What Happened When I Disappeared

On December 19, 2019, I posted the last thing I would publish through The Comfort Killers for nearly five years. There was no grand announcement. No farewell episode. No explanation to the people who had read the articles, listened to the podcast, taken the courses, watched the videos and allowed me to become part of their personal-development journey.

I just disappeared.

If you knew me during that period before I left, you knew that my life and The Comfort Killers were inseparable. I got up and made videos. I recorded my workouts. I wrote, spoke, traveled, interviewed people, built products and shared what I was learning in real time. I wasn’t standing at a distance telling people how to get uncomfortable. I was using my own life to demonstrate what getting uncomfortable looked like.

My relationship was part of that life too. My then-girlfriend and I worked together, traveled together, interviewed together, learned together, trained together and built together. We lived in a beautiful house and, from the outside, it probably appeared that we were creating a beautiful life. People saw us together because we really did do almost everything together. Our relationship wasn’t hidden behind the business; it was woven through it.

Then I did something that shattered the alignment between who I said I was and how I was actually living.

I cheated on her.

There is no clever language that can clean that up. There is no personal-development terminology that makes it less dishonest. I betrayed someone I loved. I lied. And when I had the opportunity to communicate honestly about what I was feeling and what was happening inside me, I did not have the courage to do it.

That truth rattled my soul.

The contradiction was almost impossible for me to carry. I was publicly encouraging people to confront fear, practice discipline, develop themselves and live with integrity, while privately I had failed to do one of the most uncomfortable things a person can do: tell the truth before the truth destroys something.

I knew how to communicate with an audience. I could explain an idea, motivate a room, record a podcast and help someone else confront the thing they were avoiding. But inside my own relationship, where communication required vulnerability instead of performance, I didn’t have the guts to say what needed to be said. That failure created a fracture in my relationship, my identity and eventually my work.

The person I cheated with did not bring the value I imagined I was seeking. That relationship eventually fizzled out, and it ended painfully. I experienced what felt like karma coming directly back to collect from me, and part of me believed I deserved every bit of it. For years, I carried guilt, sadness and defeat. I felt weak because my decisions did not align with the principles I had preached.

And because The Comfort Killers came directly through me, when I stopped believing in myself, the business stopped too.

When the Teacher No Longer Trusts Herself

I kept asking myself: How can I tell people to get uncomfortable when I avoided discomfort in the most important area of my own life? How can I speak about success, self-mastery and personal development while knowing that I had been a cheater and a liar? How could I continue presenting myself as someone worth listening to when I no longer trusted the person behind the microphone?

I didn’t know how to answer those questions, so I hid.

Initially, I told myself that I was stepping away to work on myself. That sounded responsible, but the truth is that I did not immediately do the work. I went underground with the pain still sitting inside me. My world had crumbled, and I didn’t know how to rebuild it or even stabilize it. I felt as though I had interrupted my own blessing right when my life and work were becoming what I had prayed for.

Instead of confronting what had happened, processing it and allowing the lesson to mature me, I allowed shame to convince me that disappearing was the same thing as accountability.

It wasn’t.

Accountability says, “I did this. I accept what it caused. Now I must become someone who does not repeat it.”

Shame says, “I did this, therefore I no longer deserve to be seen.”

For too long, I listened to shame.

It Wasn’t Only the Breakup

There was another truth underneath my disappearance. By then, I had also become deeply negative about the motivation and personal-development industry. I watched people move from point A to point B very quickly while I compared the amount of work I had done with the results I had received. I watched people use models, methods and approaches that felt familiar to what I had been creating and get further with them—sometimes people I believed had used me to move faster.

I became bitter about how business worked. I questioned why some people seemed to arrive so quickly while I was still fighting to make everything work. I had given the public so much of who I was, and when the outcome did not match the sacrifice, I began to feel as though I had given people something they were owed instead of something I had first owed to myself.

That was the wrong way to see it, but it was how I felt.

I wanted a backside life. I wanted to be somewhere nobody was watching, nobody was expecting anything and nobody could compare the woman speaking about courage with the woman who had made decisions she deeply regretted. I thought getting offline would quiet all of it.

Instead, the silence became years.

When I look back now, I see four years in which I could have confronted what happened, responded to it and continued building. That does not mean I should have rushed back online and pretended everything was fine. It means I could have done the real work without abandoning my purpose.

But I didn’t know that then.

The Business Disappeared Because I Was the Business

My absence exposed something else I had failed to understand: The Comfort Killers had been built entirely around me.

When I stopped, it stopped.

The message, the media, the delivery, the energy and the operation all depended on my ability to show up. There was no real separation between Stacy and the company. There were no people, systems or structures capable of carrying the mission when I could not carry it personally.

At the time, I probably would have called that authenticity. Now I also recognize it as a weakness in the business model.

Today, I operate a B2B company with employees, processes and responsibilities that do not disappear because I am having a difficult week. I am still working to make that company less dependent on me, and it is not easy. Building a business that can function without its founder requires clarity, documentation, trust, leadership and an enormous amount of work in the beginning. But I now understand why that work matters.

A mission should be able to outlive the mood, circumstances and availability of the person who started it.

That lesson has changed how I build everything.

The Skill That Brought Me Back

In 2024, something finally shifted.

I was on a group conference call with a few friends, and one of them—who lives in Tampa—kept talking about artificial intelligence. This was during the stage when most people described AI by saying, “You talk to it, it talks back, it can build you a schedule,” as if it were an interesting new toy.

But I had already spent four or five years feeling left behind. I felt disconnected from business, technology, innovation and what was happening in the marketplace. I knew I could either remain intimidated by the speed of change or make a decision that this time I would not be left behind.

So I decided to learn AI.

That decision became one of the doorways back to myself.

Learning something new reminded me that I could still become a beginner. I could still be curious. I could still understand complicated things, build with them and create possibilities I had not previously imagined. AI did not erase what happened during the missing years, but it helped reactivate the part of me that learns, experiments and moves.

That is where the next part of this story begins.

Why I Am Telling You This Now

This is the first letter in a five-part series about the years I disappeared and what brought me back.

In the next letter, I will talk about learning a new skill, how artificial intelligence changed the way I think and build, and what it has done for my companies.

Then I am going to talk honestly about what it took to confront the years I spent hiding—the guilt, the loss, the decisions and the parts of myself I did not want to examine.

I will also take you through the businesses I entered during that time, my return to a nine-to-five and what those experiences taught me about work, identity, money and building a company that does not collapse when its founder steps away.

We are also going to talk about something I wish I had understood much earlier: it is okay. Not “okay” because betrayal does not matter or because our choices do not have consequences. It is okay because a human being can do something wrong, accept responsibility, change and still have a life worth living. You can lose years and still use what remains. You can fall out of alignment and choose to realign. You can regret who you were without condemning who you are still capable of becoming.

Finally, I am going to tell you what happened when I returned to the work I had created through The Comfort Killers—especially the 30-Day Building Blocks to Success course. Revisiting that material has reawakened something in me. It feels as though my past self knew that one day I would need the very information I was creating for everyone else.

Out of everything I have built, I may have been building this for myself all along.

I am now using the system day by day, and I am experiencing its power from the other side—not only as its creator, but as someone who genuinely needs it. That is shaping what The Comfort Killers is becoming now: not an archive of motivational content and not a personality built around pretending to have everything figured out, but a movement and a system for people who are ready to identify where they are, confront what is keeping them there and receive a real plan for moving forward.

To the People I Left

I owe you an apology.

Some of you were listening every week. Some of you were reading, taking the courses or using the work to get through something difficult. Some of you may have needed another podcast, another article or simply the reminder that somebody else was willing to face discomfort with you.

And I left abruptly.

I am sorry.

I cannot reclaim the years I was gone. I cannot rewrite what I did or remove the consequences from the people I hurt. What I can do is tell the truth, stop hiding and make what comes next worthy of the lessons those years gave me.

I am here now, and I am accessible.

If The Comfort Killers ever meant something to you, if the work helped you, if you wondered where I went, or if you are currently hiding from a part of your own story, reach out to me.

This time, I am not returning as someone who believes she has never failed.

I am returning as someone who finally understands that getting uncomfortable is not only about chasing success, working harder or becoming fearless. Sometimes getting uncomfortable means admitting that you were wrong. Sometimes it means standing inside the wreckage without blaming anyone else. Sometimes it means forgiving yourself without excusing yourself.

And sometimes it means returning to the work after you convinced yourself that you no longer deserved to do it.

I disappeared because I was ashamed of who I had become.

I am coming back because I finally understand that confronting that woman—not hiding her—is the work.