2:2 When Success Feels Miserable: Rebuilding After Burnout, Betrayal, And Self-Abandonment

What happens when the life you worked your ass off to build looks successful from the outside, but feels miserable to live on the inside?

In this raw Season 2 episode of Airing Out Your Vagina, Allie Trimble-Lozano talks about corporate burnout, healthcare leadership, betrayal, rebuilding, boundaries, and the brutal realization that success, survival, and alignment are not the same damn thing.

From bedside nurse to hospital CEO to regional healthcare executive, Allie built the career most people would call impressive. The titles were there. The paycheck was there. The LinkedIn version looked phenomenal. But behind the scenes, her nervous system was hanging on by a thread, her boundaries were nonexistent, and the version of herself required to survive those rooms was costing way too much.

This episode is for high-achieving women who are tired of being praised for surviving environments that are quietly draining the life out of them. It’s for the women who’ve been the fixer, the strong one, the dependable one, the chaos coordinator, and the person everyone assumes will just figure it out.

Allie gets honest about leaving corporate healthcare, losing access to the podcast she built, trusting the wrong people, questioning herself, and realizing that rebuilding your life often means grieving the version of success you were taught to chase.

If you’re burned out, starting over, setting boundaries, questioning your career, rebuilding after betrayal, or finally choosing yourself after years of self-abandonment, this episode is going to hit close to home. Maybe uncomfortably close. Good. That’s kind of the point.

Get Allie’s free eBook, It’s About Damn Time because you’ve given the company everything … It’s About Damn Time You Got Some Answers!
Download Your Copy Here:  https://go.allietrimblelozano.com/damned-time-or

Growth starts with honesty, and honesty sometimes requires airing things out.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Somewhere between the corner office, the carpool line, and the third glass of wine, a lot of women lose themselves. Allie Trimble Lizzano, she found her way back, and she's not keeping the roadmap to herself. This is Airing Out Your Vagina. Grace, grit, and a splash of sarcasm. Here's Allie.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

We're really here, and I am just thrilled, can you tell? Welcome to season two of Airing Out Your Vagina, where honesty comes first, comfort comes last, and growth is non-negotiable. I'm Allie, and I am so excited to be back and officially launching season two. If you're new here, welcome. And if you've been here all along, thanks for sticking with me. I learned a lot during the process of launching, recording, and then for a bit there, losing my podcast to the hands of someone that I trusted. Am I unscathed? No. Has it been really hard and just plain sucked at some points along the way trying to launch season two? Absolutely. I would be lying if I said that it hasn't. But you know what? Here I am. And so with that, buckle up Buttercup. Season two starts right now. And what are we talking about? Well, today we're talking about something I think a lot of women are quietly experiencing right now. Especially high performing, high achieving women. Totally different group of people. This is not poor me, boo-hoo, bad things happened. What it is is I built a life I thought I was supposed to want, and then I realized survival, success, and alignment are not the same thing. And that distinction matters way more than I think any of us realized. The realization that success doesn't automatically equal peace, that titles and a bigger paycheck or payout kill burnout. They don't. Money doesn't fix nervous system exhaustion. And no amount of external validation will save you from internal misalignment. Some of us, self-included, spent years climbing ladders only to realize that they were leaned against the whole wrong building. They were. Not from a place of bitterness, not from a place of regret. I have none. But from a place of honesty. Because if there's anything I am, it's true to a fault. Because I think a lot of women are silently rebuilding right now. Not just careers, not just businesses themselves. And that rebuild, nobody really claps for that part. They don't. I thought success would feel different. Yeah, well, it doesn't. And you know what's wild? I spent years believing there was some magical point of arrival. The next reward, the next award, the next accolade, the next promotion, the next title, the next level of responsibility. Like somehow I felt if I could just achieve enough, earn enough, accomplish enough, lead enough, prove enough, shit. If I could just be enough, then eventually I'd feel safe. I'd feel successful. I'd feel confident, peaceful, fulfilled. And listen, I did accomplish a lot. I went from bedside nursing to chief executive officer in like 10 years. I led hospitals. I managed massive operations under significant pressure. I navigated thousands of people through COVID and thousands of patients that depended upon us through a global pandemic. I mean, yeah, I built teams, I drove outcomes. I survived rooms that were designed for outspoken women to fail in. And for a long time, I wore my ability to endure hard things like I don't know, some sort of a badge of honor. Like I'd earned this because I survived it. Until one day I looked around and I realized I didn't like the version of me that I was being forced into becoming in order to continue to survive in those very rooms. Constantly on guard, armored up always, fighting to protect my teams and the patients that we were all here trying to take care of, waiting for the next job to, I guess, appear, the next insecure boss to leave, the budget cut to try to navigate without causing unsafe conditions in my facilities, watching helplessly, literally helplessly, as competent, proactive, heart-led leaders fell one after another after another, replaced by smiling, nodding yes people that had no earthly idea what they were doing, that had been appointed to roles that they didn't belong in. I may have to do a whole podcast episode on weaponized incompetence and what that looks like. Now that is some gnarly shit, and I lived through it, so I got some stories. But I adored the team that I had built, and I had built it from the ground up. I literally hired every single employee in the first hospital that I opened. Why? Because I knew that that was my one chance to really set a phenomenally strong foundation for what I intended to build. And we did it. I loved the work that we were doing in the markets that I led. 92% retention during a global pandemic in healthcare does not happen by accident. It happens with top-tier level quality scores at some of the highest acuity, highest volume facilities in the organization because of the people that I hired, because of that team. I built an incredible team and we accomplished all of those things together. And I stayed a lot longer than I wanted to. And if we're being honest, a lot longer than I probably should have because of that team and the work we were doing together for our community. What I didn't realize, and what I didn't take the moments that should have been like a smack in the face to realize, was the tremendous personal cost that came with all of that. Fighting for my teams, fighting for our patients, supporting the front line and doing what was right, despite the pushback I received from my boss, and frankly, the consequences. It was exhausting, infuriating, heartbreaking, just gut wrenching. And as toxic dysfunction often is, the pressure just kept coming. It pressured me to do things and manage in a way that were not in alignment with who I am as a nurse, as a leader, or shit, as a human being. I just couldn't keep my mouth shut anymore. Somewhere along the way, I'd stopped asking myself a really important question. Does any of this feel good anymore? Is there any real hope of positive change in this environment? I think this happens to a lot of us because I think high performing, especially high performing, high achieving women become really good at functioning in the chaos. Survival mode. We normalize stress, we normalize exhaustion, we normalize overfunctioning, carrying everyone else's emotionally or emotional weight while running on fumes ourselves. And people praise us for it. That's the dangerous part. Nobody tells high achieving women that sometimes the thing killing you is the life everyone else envies. Phew! That one took me a while to fully understand. Because externally, again, I was the epitome of success. I mean, I'd climbed all the way to the top on paper. And to those watching from the cheap seats, I was killing it. Internally, oh my god, my nervous system was hanging on by a fucking thread. And when I say thread, I mean like nothing. I was one nasty gram or snarky text from my boss away from a total and complete breakdown. I can't tell you how many times I went up to the shell space of the facility I ran just to stomp my feet like a toddler and do this and cry in private. And then blow my nose, powder my face, put on some lipstick, pull the big girl panties on, and suck it up, buttercup. And the thing about achieving addiction is that there's never enough. The next achievement will not heal the wound underneath it. There's always another title, another goal, another milestone, another thing to prove. And eventually, I had to sit with the really uncomfortable realization that I had spent a lot of my life trying to earn validation and acceptance from others. Instead of realizing I was worthy of both of those things just by being me, by showing up, trying to earn rest instead of believing I deserved peace regardless of productivity. That's a hard realization for women like us. It just is. Here's the truth. Corporate America, healthcare edition or otherwise, rewards women who abandon themselves. Let's go ahead and say the uncomfortable thing out loud. You know I love to do that. Corporate culture, especially for women, rewards self-abandonment all the time, especially in healthcare leadership. And from what my education leadership friends say, it's very similar in that area. Do you think it's a coincidence on that note that on the low end, let's say 85% of nurses and about 78% of K-12 educators are women? Well, respectively, if you look at CEO level positions or higher, you know, board execs, things along those lines, only about 15% in healthcare and about 30% in education are held by women. Coincidence? I'll leave that up to you to decide. My point is men are far less likely to put up with this kind of crap than women are. We've been conditioned to think, take it or leave it, be grateful. You have a seat at the table. You should be happy that you're even here. Women are consistently rewarded for overextending, rewarded for sacrificing themselves, rewarded for tolerating impossible expectations set by people that have no idea how to get there themselves, rewarded for being available all the time, for staying calm while carrying chaos. I used to have a desk plaque, literally, it sat on my desk that said chaos coordinator, and man, if that isn't the damn truth. And somewhere along the way, burnout became confused with ambition, especially for women, because women are expected to lead like executives while nurturing like mothers and absorbing everyone else's emotional dysfunction like professional therapists. It's honestly insane when you really step back and look at it. It's nuts. And I became very good at surviving in those environments. Too good. Because I became the fixer, the dependable one, the strong one, the one who could carry impossible situations and somehow still function, pull it off. There was a time when I was traveling to MD Anderson with my dad. We were running back and forth, and I was running multiple hospitals, sitting on multiple boards and managing hundreds of people. Did I take time off? No. I just did it from my laptop and someone else's hospital waiting room with my earbuds in. From my cell phone on someone else's hospital Wi-Fi while my father slept in his bed. But here's the problem. When you become the strong one, the problem? Yeah. People stop checking to see if you're okay. And eventually you stopped checking to see if you're okay. I became so good at surviving high pressure environments that I stopped asking myself whether I was happy in them. Was I happy in this environment? Hell no, I was not happy. I was freaking miserable. But I sure looked good doing it, and no one was the wiser, myself included, for honestly, way too long. And I know I'm not alone in that. I know I'm not the only woman listening to this who's done that. I see you. A lot of women listening right now are surviving environments that are draining the ever living shit out of them while simultaneously being praised for how resilient they are inside those same environments. That's not success, my friend. It's not. It's survival. And survival mode is not supposed to be a permanent address. It's not, but it's become that for so many of us. I ignored it and I kept pushing. And then everything fell apart. And let me tell you, here's where life gets real humbling. Because eventually, everything I had so carefully constructed over nearly two decades started cracking. And honestly, some of it needed to. In an incredibly toxic work environment, I'd been conditioned to live in survival mode. I'd held my tongue, kept my head down, and just kept executing until I just couldn't anymore. I'd reported things to the powers that be. They'd heard the same from others, but it just continued to deteriorate. I wrote and published the book that ended the chapter of my life from one day to the next that I'd spent two decades building. I was out on my ass with all my things left out on the front porch at this house, without a second thought from any of the leadership that I had killed myself for for nearly a decade, some of them for longer than that. Not a word from the family whom I'm estranged, checking in to see if AJ and I needed anything or if we could pay our bills. Could I keep a roof over our heads? Just silence. Someone I thought was my dear friend, my person, just saying, Well, what did you think was gonna happen? I mean, you published a book with that title as a CEO of a hospital, obviously, and then silence. Sometimes our most painful chapters in life are made that much more painful because some of the key people in them were not who we thought that they were. But the blessing in it is that some of the people near and dear, they step up in ways you could never have even imagined. That, those people, they're my tribe. Those are my people because it's reciprocal. I've got their back and they've got mine. We don't have to agree on everything, and we don't. How boring would that be? But we are always there for one another in the big ways and in the really subtle ones too. When they're shining, I love it. When they're falling, I'm there, and vice versa. And with that, I started an entirely new chapter of my life. I became a best-selling author. I started a healthcare operations consulting business, an executive coaching practice, and a career in public speaking. I started this podcast and hit the ground running with I don't know, all sorts of different things because over two decades of experience in healthcare, from the frontline as a nurse to running boardrooms in corporate America, in an effort to support other individuals on their leadership and executive journeys and helping to guide them on their healthcare companies in kind of nuanced areas that are my niche, wherever I can add value. When I mentioned earlier about things starting to crack, the podcast situation I mentioned in the intro, holy Toledo. Yeah. Because it was another one of those tower moments. We've talked about those on season one. Y'all, there is truly nothing that humbles you quite, like realizing your entire podcast account is apparently attached to a college marketing intern's personal device, and the marketing intern refuses to provide you with the passwords. I wish I was kidding. I genuinely sat there like this cannot actually be happening right now. Like what the fuck is even going on? I spent all this time, energy, effort, and money, and because of one woman's shady business actions, I have to start over again, rebuild again? I mean, really. But then it dawned on me. There's the lesson. Losing access to something I built was painful, financially painful, emotionally painful, professionally painful. But if I'm being honest, what hurt the most wasn't losing a podcast account, all the money and time invested, or even the friend I thought I was making it with. It was realizing how much of my sense of worth was still attached to external things and at someone else's mercy. Titles, recognition, platforms, validation, none of that. When those things started getting shaky, I realized parts of me still felt shaky too. And that's hard to admit publicly, especially when people see you as strong. I had moments where I was angry. I was so pissed off, and I was embarrassed, humiliated, totally heartbroken, questioning myself, what am I even doing? Should I even be doing this? Questioning my ability to trust people. I've said for a long time that my boyfriend or partner spouse picker is broken. I'll admit that, I'll own that. But I started getting concerned that maybe my people picker in general really was broken, wasn't worth a damn. I mean, my right hand guy at the hospitals that I'd promoted repeatedly from frontline staff all the way to C CNL slid right into my CEO seat while it was still warm. That person who had said so many times, I go, you go, couldn't even be bothered to hold delivery of my personal belongings until I was home to receive them, told the courier to leave them on the porch. Heartbreaking. Then this girl from a marketing firm, owner, she's actually the owner of the marketing firm, claimed to be a woman supporting other women. She was nothing of the support or of the sort. She was actually just looking for an invoice to be paid. After sixteen months of religiously on-time invoice payments, I tried to have one conversation over some pretty serious mishaps on her part, and she blew up the relationship. I was actually having a real hard moment of not self-reflection so much as just flat out self blame when I got a call from someone I've known for years. We were chatting and both sharing updates and things going on in our lives and stuff that Was troubling. Um, and I made a comment about the fact that in my life, I'm the common denominator. My divorce, the dissolution of my closest friend, the estrangement from my family, the job loss, and then this latest shit show of issues with the marketing firm. I was the common denominator. So the problem had to be me. It's gotta be me. And she said something in that moment that stopped me in my tracks. She said, Yeah, Allie, you're the common denominator because you did what you tell everyone else to do. You have spent your entire life abandoning yourself for the benefit of others. Seeking what was in your best interest for what was in the best interest of other people, you always picked other people. What broke your heart, but kept them comfortable until one day you took your own advice and you stopped doing that. You quit betraying yourself for the benefit of everyone around you. And the people in your life who were so accustomed to that old version of you could not or would not adopt the boundaries that you set. Having standards for what you would and would not accept or tolerate. They couldn't take that. I sat there for quite a bit, quite a while. And then I'll be honest, I started bawling. This old friend had summed up in two minutes what I had been grappling with for months. Self-loathing and self-blaming, and then realizing that nothing I had done or said or asked made any of this my fault. As usual, I leaned on my funny bone and I got her laughing because I said, you know what? I'm gonna make sure to warn people that when they set boundaries or they change their expectations of what they will and will not tolerate, maybe you should do it in like a single area of your life, like one step at a time. Not like me, not blow up the whole fucking thing all at once. Career, family, spouse, friend, all of it. But in the end, I guess it depends on what's best for you, what works for your approach. Are you the person that tears the band-aid off in one hard rip, or are you the person that goes little by little by little feeling each little painful pull at a time? I'm a rip the band-aid off girl. I guess I really am a rip the band-aid off kind of girl. But you know what? Someone else's shitty behavior should ref it should reflect poorly on them, not on those of us their choices bleed on to. So yeah, I sat in the mud for a bit, but I didn't allow myself a full blown pity party for months on end. I didn't allow this experience to derail me from my chosen path. The difference is that this time I'm doing it myself. Learning all the steps in the process so that I'm no longer at someone else's mercy. I'm taking the reins back and I've put myself back in the captain seat of my life, the CEO of my own life. And this captain has absolutely no intention of going down with the ship, just in case you're hoping. That's one of the most obvious things about bottoming out. There's literally nowhere to go but up. I'd ask people to follow me and join the journey by subscribing to my channel in the past. And I know those interested in what I've had to say and what I have to share will happily do so again. And so this time, there's no one editing me. I know it's kind of scary. Or telling me what to do or what to say or what not to do or say. I was pretty hardcore me the first time around with episode or season one. Now, it's just me talking about the hard stuff, sharing my own failures and lessons learned, and just as openly and honestly, the things that did not go well. I'm a big believer that while success feels good, and I mean it feels good, and it looks amazing, but you know what? We don't grow from our successes. We grow when the shit gets real and we have to figure out how we're gonna navigate it. We grow when we try to have a conversation with someone and they kick us to the curb, refusing to give us access to our own intellectual property. We learn and we grow when we speak up at work and it costs us our seat at the table, and for me, my livelihood. We learn and we grow when we put ourselves back on our own priority list and it costs a friendship or a relationship. I mean, think about it. Really, think about it. If while we love someone and we are doing for them, we also want to be loved and done for in return. What is in our own best interest and is right for us, if it costs us that person, is that really a loss? None of us should even consider paying that price ever. And I've paid it a million times over. Never again. And let me tell you something. Entrepreneurship, people don't really like to talk about this part. Everybody posts the launch party, right? Everybody posts the wins. Very few people post about the betrayal, share the financial missteps, mistakes, the contracts. They should have never signed, the people they trusted too quickly, the panic attacks, the self-doubt, the crying in the car, the target parking lot that you, I guess, frequent because it's private. You know, it's those things. It's sitting in the shit wondering how this happened again. It's those moments. And that's the part that I think deserves talking about. Because I know I'm not the only woman who has ignored her intuition trying to see the good in people. I know I'm not. And sometimes those lessons are fucking expensive financially, emotionally, spiritually, I mean, all of it. But I also realize something else. When your business is built on who you are, nobody can take that away from you. They can delay it, they can complicate the shit out of it, they can stress you out, piss you off, steal your stuff, but they cannot own your voice or fill your seat. And that realization changed everything for me. So, about the rebuild, nobody claps for. Here's the truth, nobody glamorizes. The rebuild, it's ugly. People love comeback stories. They love the before and after transformations. People love the highlight reel once everything's worked out. But almost nobody sticks around for the messy middle, where you're sitting on the bathroom floor wondering who the hell you even are anymore. That's the rebuild nobody's there to clap for. The quiet rebuilding, the exhausted rebuilding, the rebuilding while grieving, the rebuilding while doubting yourself and your ideas, the rebuilding while trying not to completely lose your shit. And I think women especially struggle here because we're taught our worth is tied to how well we maintain the illusion that everything's okay. The I'm fine, it's fine, everything is fucking fine, thumbs up while sticking out of the swamp water that you're holding your breath in, trying not to just die. Meanwhile, internally is the drowning part. You're literally unraveling one decision, one choice at a time. Rebuilding isn't just external, it's not just rebuilding a business or a podcast or a career. It's rebuilding your relationship with yourself. Your boundaries, your intuition, your nervous system, your confidence, your standard, tell your identity. I had to learn how to stop performing strength and actually build it. Huge difference. Huge. Because performing strength usually looks like I'm fine, I've got it, I'll handle it, no worries, everything's okay. I'm fine, it's fine, everything's fine. Actual strength sounds like I'm struggling, I need rest. Hey, that hurt me. I can't carry this alone. I need to change something and I need to change it fast. I need your help. And let me tell you, that lesson humbled me in ways I can't even fully explain yet. I'm still rebuilding. I've never been a person to ask for help. Ever. I've just always found a way to figure it out. I remember a really stinging my eyes are gonna water conversation in a moment at MD Anderson when I was traveling back and forth with my dad. He told me after his terminal cancer diagnosis that he was very worried about my mom and my brother and what they were going to do with all of this, and most certainly when he passed, and how concerned he was about that, but that he was not concerned about me. I just kind of stood there, looked at him for a minute, like, what the hell? And then he said it. He said he's never had to worry about me because I'm strong, and I've always just figured everything out. It was in that moment that I realized this was a piece of what was foundationally wrong with my relationship with my father, but my relationship to myself. I'd always been back burnered. I'd always been left to navigate hard things and figure it out myself. It wasn't that they didn't love me. I know that. It was that they had bigger fish to fry and other members of the family that didn't have that same strength or resilience or grit. And so all of their attention was focused there. And there just wasn't enough to go around. Yeah, it took me to 47 to realize that. I'd needed and deserved the same level of support and concern, but I hadn't demanded it in the same way. And so I just never got it. And then I realized I repeated that pattern and every relationship I'd had since. I do think that the rebuild changes you in some beautiful ways. I really do. Because once you survive losing things you thought defined you, once you survive things that would have taken most other people out of the race completely, once you survive the seemingly unsurvivable, you stop being so afraid all the time. And that lack of fear becomes freedom. And let me tell you, that is powerful as hell. I've said on more than one occasion to more than one person over the last few years that I feel freer and more me than I have ever felt in my life. Did it come at a cost? Hell yeah, it did. And I'm rebuilding. But honestly, I would pay that cost over and over again as opposed to the price I had been paying for choosing others over me for the majority of my life. What success means to me now, it means something very different than it used to. And honestly, thank God for that. Because old me thought success meant proving myself, checking the boxes, climbing the ladders, never-ending addiction to the next accomplishment, the next praise from others. Now, it means finally belonging to me. My voice, my thoughts, my heart, my mind, my nervous system that's regulated. My body, feeling comfortable in my own skin, maybe for the first time ever. Being free to just be me, just Sally, speaking up, speaking of, doing things that I want to do. My son asked me recently why I hadn't changed my name back after the divorce. And I shared with him that it was important to me that I had the same last name as he did. And that started a whole conversation because I shared that with all that's happened, I don't really feel like a Trimble anymore than I do a Lozano. So I don't know. Maybe instead of Allie Trimble Lozano, maybe it's just Allie, like Prince or Adele or somebody else big. Who knows? But in the end, that was a powerful moment for me. Success used to mean titles, status, recognition, money, validation, achievement, being needed, being impressive. Now, success is pretty quiet. It feels like peace, alignment, safety in my own body, authenticity, freedom to be me, purpose, honest relationships, meaningful work, rest without guilt, boundaries without apology. And maybe that sounds less glamorous to some people, but I can tell you this nothing feels better than being able to look at your life and recognize yourself living it. I don't want to build a life that looks successful but feels miserable to live. I don't want that anymore. I don't care what it looks like from the outside looking in. I care what it looks like and feels like from the inside. And I don't think I'm alone in these sentiments. I think a lot of women are kind of waking up to this right now. We're tired. We're not weak. We're not incapable. We're just tired. Tired of abandoning ourselves to maintain systems, relationships, expectations, and honestly, versions of success that no longer align with who we are or what we want. And maybe the reason some of y'all feel exhausted isn't because you're failing. Maybe it's because you've outgrown the version of success you were taught to chase after. It doesn't fit anymore. It doesn't feel good anymore. Maybe the breakdown is the awakening. Maybe losing what no longer aligns is actually the beginning of finding yourself again. And if that's where you are right now, I just want you to know that you're not broken. You're not broken. You're rebuilding. And there's a huge damn difference. Thank you for being with me here today as we get ready and are launching season two. I still can't believe it. Truly. Not just for the support when things are polished and exciting and growing, but for staying through the messy middle. That's the rebuild. And the rebuild with me learning how to run my podcast from my cell phone in my computer in my living room. The grace, oh, the grace for the occasional dog barking or cat meowing or car going by on the street or the doorbell ringing in the background. Thank you. The kind of support means that I can never truly say thank you enough for because season two is going deeper. It's gonna be more honest, more uncomfortable, more real, more healing, more truth-telling, more conversations that people are thinking, but afraid to say out loud. I will. And more guests willing to go there with me. And honestly, that's exactly the kind of space I want this podcast to be. Not perfect, not polished, not curated, not performative, just real. Allie. So if you're rebuilding too, welcome. You're in really good company here. We're rebuilding together. I was thinking of posing to myself the same question that I did during season one. That what is one belief that you had to let go of in order to get to where you are now? And for me right now, the answer to that question is easy. The belief that only some totally unrealistic, perfect version of me is worthy. So here I am, unpolished, far from perfect, but real, vulnerable, authentically me. Thanks for tuning in. And remember, growth starts with honesty, and honesty sometimes requires airing things out. I'll see you next week.