The settlement went through on a Wednesday. By Thursday I was at my daughter’s school pickup, standing with the other parents, and someone asked how work was going and I said fine and didn’t know where to start.

I’d been building the company for twelve years. Not building in the romantic sense — building in the sense of grinding, of missed dinners, of 2 AM bug fixes, of conversations with my wife that started with I just need one more hour and ended much later and less happily. Twelve years of that. And then one Wednesday it was done and I drove home and the house was quiet and I sat in the kitchen and ate a sandwich.

People assume you’ll feel relief. And you do, eventually. But the first thing you feel is something closer to vertigo.

Your whole identity has been organized around a problem. You wake up and the problem is there. You fall asleep and the problem is there. Every decision you make, every relationship you build, every risk you take — filtered through the prism of the problem. What does this mean for the company? How does this help? Is this moving us forward or backward?

And then one day there’s no problem anymore.

I found myself, in those first weeks, starting sentences I couldn’t finish. We should probably— and then stopping. I was thinking about the— nothing. The grammar of my thinking had been built around an object that no longer existed.

I started building apps. Small ones, personal ones. Things I wanted to exist. A game library tracker, because I had seventeen years of games across platforms and no way to remember what I’d played or for how long. A voice-first fitness app, because I wanted to talk to something that would help me get healthier without shaming me for not being healthier already.

It’s different, building without stakes. Lower in some ways — no one’s livelihoods depending on whether you ship this sprint. But also strange. The urgency was load-bearing. It was doing a lot of work, psychologically. Without it I had to find other reasons to care.

The reason I found, eventually, was simpler than I expected: I like making things that work. I like the moment when the thing does the thing it’s supposed to do and you know it’s right because it feels right. That moment doesn’t require stakes. It just requires honesty.

So I kept building. I’m still building.

And at school pickup, when someone asks how work is going, I’m getting better at the answer.