Not because I was drunk. Not because I was on the phone. Not because I was reckless in the obvious way people recognise. I was simply elsewhere. My body was in the car. My hands were at ten and two. The motorway moved under me as it always had. But my mind had started to detach itself from ordinary reality, and I did not yet have the courage to call that by its name.

I remember one evening in particular in the Netherlands. It was already dark by late afternoon, that flat winter dark that arrives without drama. I had left a meeting later than planned. I had spoken well, I think. Calm voice, decent suit, correct answers. The kind of performance that lets a man continue pretending he is still fully operational.

When I got into the car, I noticed something small and stupid. My right knee was trembling against the steering column. Not violently. Just enough to make the plastic vibrate with a faint tapping sound. I turned the heater up because I thought I was cold. I was not cold.

A few minutes later I realised I had missed my exit.

That happens to anyone, of course. A tired person. A distracted person. A man with too much on his mind. So I told myself exactly that. I took the next exit, looped round, and joined the motorway again.

Then I missed it a second time.

What I remember most is not fear. Fear would have been clearer. It was stranger than that. It was the feeling that the road had stopped feeling real in the normal human way. The lights of the cars ahead looked slightly smeared, as if they belonged to a film I was watching rather than a world I was inside. My shoulders were rigid. My mouth was dry enough that I kept pressing my tongue against the back of my teeth. At one point I realised I had been holding my breath for so long that I had to force myself to exhale.

I pulled into a petrol station and stayed in the parked car without switching the engine off. I did not cry. I did not collapse. I did not have some cinematic breakdown. I just sat there with both hands still on the wheel, staring at the windscreen, while the wipers dragged a dirty arc through light rain.

That was the day driving no longer felt normal.

It matters to say this plainly. By that stage, the business problems were already serious. Pressure had become distortion. Sleep had become irregular. Judgment had become narrower. I was still taking calls, still attending meetings, still trying to negotiate with reality as if discipline alone could repair a structure that had already started to fail.

But something more dangerous had happened. My body had begun to tell the truth before my mouth did.

That is one of the cruelest phases in founder collapse. You still look functional enough to be believed by others, and often by yourself. You can still send the email. You can still enter the room. You can still speak intelligently for an hour. But ordinary things begin to lose their ordinary shape. Driving. Reading. Following a simple conversation. Choosing what matters first. The system is no longer regulating itself properly, yet the outer shell continues to imitate competence.

I know now that this is not a dramatic metaphor. It is governance failure at the level of the self.

People use the language of burnout too easily. Sometimes they use it to sound modern. Sometimes to soften what is actually happening. But there are moments in a person’s decline where the issue is no longer just tiredness or overwork. The issue is that your instrument is no longer reliable. And if you are a founder, that has consequences far beyond your own private suffering.

When I say this, I do not say it as a victim of my own story. I say it as a man who has had to look back and admit what distortion costs.

If you are driving in a state where the road no longer feels fully real, you are not only unwell. You are becoming unsafe. Unsafe for yourself, yes, but also for others who never consented to be inside your collapse. The same principle applies in business. A founder whose judgment is becoming chemically, psychologically, or morally unstable does not suffer alone. Suppliers feel it. Staff feel it. Clients feel it. Creditors feel it. Partners feel it. The damage moves outward from the private body into the shared structure.

That is why I reject romantic language about entrepreneurial suffering. There is nothing noble about becoming so distorted that normal functions begin to misfire while you still insist on calling it commitment.

At the time, I did not understand this well enough. I still thought endurance was a virtue in itself. I still thought the decent thing to do was push through, stay available, keep holding the centre. I had not yet fully understood that there comes a point when continuing in the same condition is not service. It is drift disguised as duty.

And drift is dangerous precisely because it does not always look dramatic.

No ambulance arrives.

No alarm sounds.

You simply become less precise, less present, less honest about what state you are in. Then one day you are sitting under fluorescent light at a petrol station with the engine running, trying to remember why driving has started to feel like operating machinery from underwater.

That moment taught me something I should have learned earlier.

When ordinary tasks begin to feel unreal, your problem is no longer productivity. It is integrity.

Integrity is not only about telling the truth to others. It is also about refusing to lie to yourself about your condition. If your nervous system is fraying, if your thinking is narrowing, if your body is showing signs that your mind keeps overruling, then your first duty is not performance. It is interruption. You stop. You assess. You tell the truth. You reduce exposure. You do not keep wrapping danger in respectable language.

I am a GRC man now in ways I was not then, and that is not only a professional identity. It is personal. I no longer believe governance starts with documents. It starts with the willingness to recognise when a system is no longer trustworthy, even when that system is your own mind under pressure.

A company can survive a difficult quarter.

A man can survive humiliation.

What neither survives well is prolonged distortion defended as normality.

That night I drove home more slowly. I opened the window for cold air. I kept both hands on the wheel as if I were teaching myself again. Nothing miraculous happened. The business problems did not disappear. My life did not suddenly reorganise itself into wisdom.

But a line had been crossed. I could no longer honestly say that everything was still basically fine.

Sometimes recovery begins there. Not in strength. Not in elegance. Just in the hard admission that what used to feel normal no longer does, and that pretending otherwise has become its own form of risk.