“The version of me you see today is Version 2.0. I have been patched, refactored, and tested under high load. I am not strong because I never broke; I am strong because I learned how to rebuild.”

For over a decade, my professional life has revolved around Quality Assurance. My job is to look for “bugs”—those hidden errors that threaten to crash a system. I’ve been trained to stress-test applications, looking for the breaking point so we can fix it before a user ever sees it.

I loved the logic of it. I loved that if something was broken, there was always a reason, and usually a fix.

But at 25, I realized that life doesn’t always come with a clean error log.

I was young, I was married, and I thought I had my life’s code written perfectly. Then, reality hit. I went through a painful divorce and a betrayal I never saw coming. It wasn’t just a “glitch” in my plan; it felt like a total system failure.

I didn’t handle it with grace or strength initially. I crashed.

The “Fatal Exception”

We often talk about resilience in business as if it’s a muscle we’re born with. We see leaders on LinkedIn talking about “hustle” and “overcoming obstacles” like it’s a sport.

But when I was in the thick of my breakdown, I didn’t feel resilient. I felt defective.

I remember sitting in the silence of my life, feeling like the screen had gone black. I was trying to run a high-performance life on a broken operating system. I had ignored the warnings—the anxiety, the doubt, the red flags—because I thought acknowledging them made me weak.

I thought being “strong” meant pretending the system was stable.

Debugging the Soul

In software, when a system crashes, you don’t throw the computer away. You reboot. You investigate. You try to find the Root Cause.

Recovering from that time in my life was the hardest “project” I’ve ever worked on. I had to apply a QA mindset to my own heart, not because I was an expert, but because I had no other choice.

I had to stop patching the symptoms.

Sleeping more wouldn’t fix the fact that I felt unworthy. Working harder wouldn’t fix the betrayal.

I had to look for the Root Cause.

I had to ask myself uncomfortable questions: Why did I accept less than I deserved? Why is my identity so tied to this one relationship?

It wasn’t a quick fix. There were days I thought I was better, only to crash again the next week. It was messy. It was nonlinear. But slowly, I started to patch the holes in my self-esteem.

Version 2.0

People sometimes ask me about the transition from being an employee to becoming the Founder of EFG Consulting. They see the business, the global clients, and the “Senior QA” title, and they assume I’ve always been confident.

The truth is, the confidence I have now didn’t come from my successes. It came from that failure.

The Elsya who runs EFG Consulting today is not the same person who broke down at 25. That version of me was “Version 1.0″—optimistic, but untested.

The version of me you see today is “Version 2.0.” I have been patched, refactored, and tested under high load.

I’m not perfect. I still have bugs. I still have days where the stress feels heavy. But the difference is, I no longer fear the crash. I know that if I break, I know how to put the pieces back together.

A Note to Anyone “Crashing”

I’m sharing this personal history not because I have all the answers, but because I know how lonely it feels when you think you’re the only one failing.

If you are a young professional currently feeling like your world is ending—whether it’s a breakup, a layoff, or just the overwhelming pressure of life—please know this:

You are not broken trash. You are just in maintenance mode.

It’s okay to go offline for a while. It’s okay to not be “productive” while you heal. Even the most robust systems need downtime.

Trust the process of debugging your life. It takes time, and it hurts, but you will come back online. And when you do, you’ll be stronger than before.

-EG