How Losing Everything Became the Beginning {Part 5 of 8 Series: Eldest Daughter Turned Cycle Breaker} | Episode 31

I didn't start because I thought I was ready. I started because everything around me stopped working.

When COVID hit, I lost my job on the same day Washington state shut down. Not as part of a layoff wave — just me, walking out of that building alone, arms full of my things, trying to hold my chin up. And for the first time in my adult life, I couldn't hide behind the hustle anymore. The income was gone. The illusion of control was gone. And what was left was me — finally forced to slow down and actually look at myself.

This episode is about what happened next. Not the clean version. The real one.

What This Episode Holds

• Losing my job the day the world shut down — and why it cracked me open in a way nothing else had
• How I had tied my entire worth, identity, and sense of control to my paycheck — and what happened when it disappeared
• The spiral that followed: more drinking, more numbing, more running from what I didn't want to feel
• The moment I decided — not in some big breakthrough, but quietly, dog-sitting for a friend — that this could not be it
• How I started The Crab That Can with nothing but a flyer, a feral little girl's energy, and a need to point my fire somewhere that wasn't self-destruction
• What it actually looks like to be destroying and creating at the same time — and why that messy in-between is the whole point

Who This Episode Is For

• The woman who has tied her worth to her work — and felt herself unravel when it was taken away
• The woman who is in the middle of the metamorphosis right now and can't see the other side yet
• The woman who has been using busyness, hustle, or control as a way to avoid feeling what's underneath
• The woman who is ready to rise — even if she is still matted and messy

"I was destroying and creating at the same time. And what I can see now is that what I was actually destroying while I was creating — I was destroying the old narrative while I was building the new one."

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This is what it actually looks like inside the cocoon. Not the butterfly. Not the caterpillar. The part nobody talks about — the messy, contradictory, uncomfortable middle where everything is trying and failing and trying again. That is where you are becoming. And once you start breaking out, you cannot be stopped.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the moment in my adult life that I feel like I was so close to life actually falling apart. And not necessarily the root of falling apart being emotional or being something internal, but in everyday external real life. I lost my job when COVID hit. Like many women, I lost control. I lost control of my finance, of my income, of my employment. And for the first time in my adult life, I felt like I could no longer hide behind anything or anyone anymore. Welcome to Wealth and Mothers, the show where we rewrite the rules of success. For women who are building businesses, creating wealth, and raising families all at the same damn time. I'm Ashley Crabbe, and this isn't a show about balance, productivity, or doing more. This is a space for mothers who know they're caring more than anyone acknowledges and who are ready to turn that into power, leadership, and wealth. Here we talk about what it actually looks like to create a movement inside the reality of motherhood. The invisible labor, the identity shifts, the ambition, the pressure. And the truth that none of it disqualifies you from wealth. It qualifies you for it. Because mothers don't need to shrink to succeed. They need to be seen. Let's get into today's episode. I didn't start because I thought I could. When COVID hit, when we were living in Washington State, the day that the state shut down in 2020, I lost my job. And it wasn't like I was part of a group layoff. I wasn't part of a layoff wave. I was the only person laid off because the day the state shut down coincided with my 90 days of being at the company. So I've also never been let go, fired, laid off from a job ever in my entire life. And I had to pack up my things by myself, walk through that building, tears running down my face, an arm full of shit in my hands. And I was the only one. And I had to leave with some sort of dignity, with my chin held high a little bit, and act like, oh, this is we're fine. This is going to be okay. Like there was literally no big conversation with my employers. There was literally no like true explanation or empathy or compassion. It was just done. And I remember walking out of that job, out of that building, thinking, what the fuck did I do to deserve to be the only one? How does that even happen? Because like I have always worked. I have always been an employee, a worker. And not only was like, because if you're, if you're my age, if you're in your 30s, um, like you've seen it all growing up, right? We've seen so many different eras and waves and emergencies. And we've seen it all, right? But this was really the first time as a grown woman that I was seeing an epidemic or, you know, a state of emergency where I didn't have like my mom and dad, another adult figure who was in control of everything else, right? So not only was like I an adult like seeing all of this for the first time and understanding how as an adult you move through this, but it was also me for the first time in my life having the one thing I felt like I could count on my financial stability, my financial freedom, my income. I couldn't count on it anymore. And no matter how chaotic my life has been, no matter how messy things have gotten, I worked, I made money, I hustled, I had multiple jobs, I figured it out, I held the shit down. I held that part down. I was a budgeter, I was a penny pincher, I was frugal, I did everything I thought was right with my wealth. And now it was gone. Like now the income, the the thing that I received was just gone. And when I think back to that crazy time, um and the the shift that so many of us went through and just the things that happened around us. When when we add in the fact that like my income was gone and the whole world is going that shit crazy, like no one was hiring, no one was looking to bring on new employees, no one knew what the hell was going on. Everything was uncertain. And for a while I sat there like, what do I do now? I went to, I did the things I was supposed to do. I went to the four-year college, I got my degree, I did the internships, I went abroad. Like, who am I now if I can't work, if I can't use my education to make money? Who am I if, first of all, I was married at that time. Scott and I were together. So who am I to not be able to provide for the household? We didn't have the boys at the time, but who am I to not be able to provide for myself? Like, what I wasn't, I I honestly in in many moments wasn't even thinking about Scott. I was thinking about me. Scott had a stable job. He worked for the federal government, he worked for the United States Postal Service. And so, like, that was quote unquote stable. But because I had tied so much of my worth, so much of my value, so much of who I was to my job, my worth, my control, my identity, when that got ripped away from me, it felt like everything, the root of me, my roots, my foundation, it felt like everything got ripped away with it. Everything underneath me went with it, and I didn't handle it well. Shocker, right? But like I didn't immediately rise, I didn't immediately forgive myself or take radical responsibility. I didn't immediately get crystal clear on who I was. I spiraled and I spiraled harder and harder and harder. More drinking, more numbing, more anxiety, more sitting in my own head on that fat freaking hamster wheel, just going, going, going, but not making any movement. More and more trying to escape the fact that I felt like I had no control. Because now I didn't even have the illusion of control anymore. Because we like we've just recently learned the idea that a paycheck is stable is an illusion. And and that's a different place to be, I think, when you realize you're not you're not actually holding anything together anymore. One you're moving fast enough so you can't see what is falling apart. So because I didn't want to see the fact that like I trusted someone and they broke that trust again, but also that I lost another layer of trust in me because somehow I wasn't enough or worthy to keep that job. I had to move fast enough through these moments of not understanding what happened exactly and what was going to happen, so that I couldn't feel anything. And now with the state shutting down, with the world shutting down, with everyone losing their minds, everything did slow down. I was forced to slow down. I was forced to wake up every morning and not just look at it, everything around me. I had to look at myself in the mirror. And I started to sit with that. I started to not skip over those parts. I started to realize that I was continuing to let it get worse before I was willing to make a decision to do something that would make it different. And somewhere in all of that chaos, not in some big, gigantic breakthrough moment, right? I had hit a point where I was like, this, this is not it. This cannot be it. This juice that I am trying to drink is not worth the squeeze. Not in my life, not in my life anymore. It's not my path. This is not how it ends. I might not have a plan. In fact, I did not have any sort of plan. My only plan was drinking and doing drugs and trying to find some job that would hire me and pay me that wasn't McDonald's, right? I'm just being honest. But I didn't even become someone new. I just decided that I was ready to do something different. And in that moment, and I do remember this moment exactly, I was dog sitting and house, I was house sitting, dog sitting for friends of ours. And it was like I realized that I was not going to flip burgers because I didn't want to. Period. Period. I didn't want to. And I decided that I would rather dog sit, I would rather do yard work, I would rather paint, I would rather literally do anything in your home that you didn't want to do instead of working in fast food. And so while I was dog sitting for friends of ours, I made flyers. I made flyers and I decided in that moment that I was going to be an entrepreneur and recording this episode with you right now. I literally get this feeling of a feral little girl deciding she's going to start a lemonade stand, sell that lemonade for 25 bucks a pop, hang signs all over the fence post in the neighborhood. And she's going to make it work. And that's what I did. Not because I had it all figured out, but because I could. Because I thought I can do this. She could do that, right? And so I started the Crab Vat Can. And I didn't fully understand in that moment at all what I was doing, what I was starting. I just knew, I just decided I needed somewhere for all of this energy to go that wasn't fucking self-destruction, that wasn't continuing the narrative and the generational cycles of what has always been done. I had so much self-destruction inside of me. That self-destruction was so intense. It was so fueled by ravage, raging fire and all of that chaos. And up until that point in my life, I had only used that fire to burn things to the ground, myself included. So, in so many ways, this was a moment where I was experiencing so much as an adult, but in in like in for the first time in a really long, long time, I took my magnetic, my bright magnetic energy and light inside of me, and I pointed it where it was truly meant to be, into creating, into building, into figuring it out, into saying, oh, hey, here's some chaos. We're gonna coordinate it and we're not gonna make you live in it anymore. And I had talked about the She-Wolf tattoo last week, but like this was the this was the time, you know, that I started the Crowd That Can. I got the She-Wolf tattoo. This was when I decided that I would not stay down. That you don't get to take me out like this, that I do not end here. I rise. Even if I'm matted and messy, even if I don't know exactly what the hell I'm doing, even if I am still, you know, two out of my four hamster legs are still on that hamster wheel. I'm still going to rise. That woman inside of me, the she-wolf inside of me rose. And I needed, I needed all of that. I needed all of this turmoil because while I was still in it, while I was still in the darkness of the anxiety and the drinking, I was willing to rise. I was pulling myself out. I wasn't fully stable. We'll acknowledge that. But now I had a foundation. Now I had something to stick my roots into because I was ready to build. And so, you know, that truth, the truth that I didn't stop destroying right away, I was destroying and creating at the same time. I was living in the and. And what I can see now is that what I was actually destroying while I was creating, I was destroying the old narrative while I was creating the new one. And so while I detoxed myself and detached my roots from these, these dead things that were going to keep me bounded, sometimes that anxiety, sometimes that fear and that doubt got worse. But it was real. It was real, right? Because I was becoming the version of me that was always there. I was returning back to that feral, free little girl. But I can only say that now because then I didn't, I didn't fully understand it. I didn't fully understand the eldest daughter, the breaking of the generational cycles, the fact that I was finally done being a martyr and a victim. I just knew that I decided I finally actually wanted it to be different. That I wanted to be different because I wanted to be the best, most loving, most naturally good version of me. And so I started making choices that didn't match the old narrative, that didn't match the cycles that I had been living, the cycles that I had been giving. And even if as I was creating and destroying and I slipped back into that old chapter a few times, when I look back now, I'm so fucking proud of myself. I am so proud of myself that I continued to rise. Not in the most clean, clear, fully understanding or understood way. But I decided in a real, true, authentic, bold, audacious way that I was finally going to go back and wrap my arms around this feral little girl that was inside of me who was ready to look back in the mirror at me. I was leaving everything behind before I truly realized that we weren't just going to leave mentally and emotionally everything behind, but we would soon be leaving physically everything behind. And so while I was creating and destroying and feeling the tension, and my body was literally trying to break, I knew that I was mending all of that breakage before it snapped. And that this process isn't pretty. And I don't think I know we don't talk about it. We don't talk about it enough. We don't talk about what actually happens in the transformation. It's like we go from caterpillar to butterfly and we don't talk about the metamorphos in between. I think about that metaphor and I think about honestly how like watching the process of a caterpillar become a butterfly fucking grosses me out. It really honestly skeeves me out because it looks messy. It looks like a contradiction. It looks like it's the most uncomfortable, painful, unnatural thing in the world. It looks like something is trying and failing and trying and failing. But that's the movement. That's the mission. That is the beauty of it. And once a caterpillar starts to break out of its cocoon, you can't stop it. But that's the movement, that's the mission. And just like a caterpillar, so we got she-wolf, we got caterpillar, but just like the caterpillar, once it starts breaking out of its cocoon, it doesn't stop. And so once I started, I could not stay where I was. Even if I tried to, even if I fell backwards sometimes, I was too committed, too determined in the shift to stop. And that that shift, that rising, that metamorphosis where everything truly begins. If this episode resonated with you, share it with another mother who is on a mission, who is building something real. This is how we change the conversation by making sure women like us are seen, heard, and paid. And if you're ready to step into your next level of visibility, leadership, and wealth, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's coming next. You can also connect with me on Instagram, TikTok, my newsletter, where I share daily thoughts and conversations around motherhood, identity, and wealth. I'll leave you with this. You are not behind, you are not too much, and you do not need to choose between your family and your success. You are the woman who gets to have it both. I'll see you in the next episode.