For 13 years, Kristin Carver Smith’s job was to make sure other people got noticed. As a publicist and founder of The New Fashioned Co., she spent her days at a laptop, shaping messaging and pitching journalists on behalf of thought leaders and brands. The work was relentless and, for a long time, thrilling. “I’ve never had a boring day before,” she says.
Then the days turned dangerous. Her agency was scaling, adding new hires and landing national headlines for clients, at the exact moment her personal life was crumbling. She was working until 9 at night, lacking sleep and eating poorly. “It was like the conditions were ripe for me to break down,” she says.
In 2024, Smith did, but the breakdown didn’t end her career. Her story challenges one of the biggest myths in business: the notion that slowing down means falling behind.
The Hidden Cost Of Growth
From the outside, 2024 appeared to be a win for Smith. Business was better than ever, work was consistent and clients were happy. The scoreboard said she was ahead, which is exactly why she kept overriding the signals telling her something was wrong.
Behind the scenes, Smith was leading from a survival response. “I’m showing up as a leader who’s very much in a survival state of mind,” she says. She suspected she was carrying PTSD but feared saying it out loud: “What sort of domino effect is this going to have?”
When the mental breakdown came, Smith says the clarity that followed was embarrassingly simple. “We glorify business leaders running off of coffee and no sleep,” she says. Picture the founder with a cot in his office. Months of sleep deprivation layered on top of PTSD eventually broke her. “There’s a reason that it’s used as a form of torture, right? And I’m out here wondering, ‘Why am I not OK?'” Her takeaway is worth taping to your computer monitor: “Don’t you ever underestimate the basics again."
Leading From Survival Mode
Smith describes the slide toward her mental collapse as the feeling of being on an ice rink and riding a trash can lid with no brakes. For a long time, she tried to steer it alone, but soon she had to stop pretending and walk into a conversation she’d been dreading. She sat her team down and told them the truth. “I’m not doing OK,” she said. “I’m actually [at] the place where I’m so burnt out, I’m not even sure I enjoy this work anymore.”
She braced for the fallout. Instead, she got grace.
One by one, her team admitted they were running on empty too. “We’re OK with seeing where this goes,” they told her, “even if where it goes is we disband.”
Smith chose a deliberate wind-down instead of a quiet implosion. She anchored the process to one promise: total honesty. The team built custom packages around what each person actually needed and left the door open to work together again down the road. That, Smith says, is the “new-fashioned” way: a de-scale with dignity.
What Slowing Down Did To Her Ambition
Recovery wasn’t a long weekend for Smith. It meant five days in the hospital followed by weeks of structured treatment, where her only job was to stay alive and get well. During those weeks, a horror story looped in her head. I’m never going to work again, she thought. No one’s ever going to trust me with their brand.
Instead, the opposite happened. Relationships she’d spent 12 years building started bearing fruit. One of the “juiciest projects” of her life landed in her lap that November. “I’ve been so surprised by how slowing down has actually accelerated and expanded my dreams,” Smith says.
Her ambition didn’t die. It changed shape. “We can’t do the things that we dream of doing in this world if we’re not OK, and I feel like I’m such living proof of that.”
That conviction drives her podcast, Just & Joyful With Kristin Carver Smith and her debut album, Light Through, Pt. 1. Rather than quietly return to work, Smith decided to build a platform around the conversations she wished she’d heard while recovering. The topic she’s after is the one most success stories skip, “that messy middle part” between the breakdown and the comeback.
She’s especially clear about who tends to get punished for sharing it. “Do we permit women to have mental health struggles and have them openly and still lead?” she asks. Smith feared that honesty would send clients running, but the people she works with now, she says, are the ones “who are not penalizing me for being honest about my struggles.”
When Shame Is Loudest
When the thing you built starts coming apart, shame arrives first, and it arrives loud. It insists you’re the only person who has ever failed this badly, that you should have seen it coming and you should be able to muscle through. Smith’s message to anyone in that place is that the voice is lying. You’re not alone and you have nothing to be ashamed of.
When her own life was unraveling, she would call her best friend in tears and say the same thing over and over: This is so hard. She meant every word, but in hindsight, she can see how little it gave the people who wanted to help. “'This is so hard’ is pretty vague,” she admits.
The answer is not to suffer more. It’s to get specific, to pick up the phone and ask someone you trust for honest feedback “because oftentimes they see the things that you can’t see.”
There’s one question Smith wishes more people would ask her because the answer guards against a fantasy: How long did it take? We’re trained to love a fast before-and-after, the kind of turnaround that fits inside a cute little montage. Her comeback took a year and a half, with days when a single trigger could wipe out everything she had planned.
Coming Home To Herself
Smith stopped calling this a reinvention. “This is less of a reinvention for me and more of a coming home and an expansion,” she says. The version of her who burned out and the version now building a podcast, an album and a business are the same person, just moving at a pace she can sustain.
That shift changed more than her schedule. It changed what she wanted her work to accomplish. Through Just & Joyful, she’s creating space for the conversations that often get edited out of success stories: the uncertainty, the setbacks and the healing that happens before the comeback.
Today, Smith isn’t interested in returning to the version of success that nearly broke her. She’s interested in building one she can actually live with. Through her podcast, new creative projects, and a different approach to leadership, she’s proving that sustainable ambition can outlast hustle every time.
To other leaders and individuals who have experienced a mental health crisis, she wants you to know this: “You’re not less qualified, less trustworthy, less capable or less anything because of your experience.”
Featured image from PeopleImages/Shutterstock
