The Day I Let the Wave Win

How breaking became the only way to become whole

I used to think breaking was the opposite of strength.

Then I sat across from Jane Marie Chen and watched her describe the exact moment she let the biggest wave of her life drag her under, and realized that surrender was the strongest thing she had ever done.

This is the story of how one of the most celebrated social entrepreneurs of our time fell apart, and why that collapse was the only thing that finally put her back together.

You can listen to the full, unfiltered, live conversation (recorded in front of an audience at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa) on the Passion Struck podcast, episode 694.

(If you only have ten minutes, start at the 33:00 mark; that’s when she describes the airplane moment she realized she was having a full mental breakdown.)

The Lie That Looks Like Purpose

Ten years ago, Jane was the golden child of social entrepreneurship. Co-founder of Embrace, the infant warmer that looked like a tiny sleeping bag and had already saved hundreds of thousands of premature babies in the poorest corners of the world. Obama praised her from the White House lawn. Beyoncé handed her a cheque on stage. The New York Times, TED, Davos; everywhere you looked, there she was, smiling the exhausted smile of someone who had decided the only acceptable speed was sprint.

Behind the applause, she was running in terror.

Then one morning in 2018, she found herself on a plane, staring out the window at nothing, realizing she no longer recognized the woman in the reflection. The company was collapsing, the investors were gone, the team was frayed, and the mission that had once felt like oxygen now felt like a belt tightening around her throat. She had given everything. There was nothing left to give, and still it wasn’t enough.

She did the only thing left to do: she bought a one-way ticket to Indonesia, packed a surfboard, and let the wave win.

That is where her memoir, Like a Wave We Break, begins: not with the triumph, but with the wipeout. And that is where the real story starts for anyone who has ever achieved something the world applauded while quietly dying inside.

We are taught that success is a straight line upward.

Work harder, help more people, win more awards, fix the broken thing, prove you are not the scared child who once got beaten for reading a history book on the front lawn instead of at a desk. The higher you climb, the more lives you save, the more the terrified kid inside relaxes. Right?

Wrong.

Jane discovered what most high-achievers eventually discover: the drive that looks like noble purpose from the outside is often unhealed trauma wearing a cape. Her childhood had taught her two lethal equations:

1. Love = perfect performance

2. Worth = measurable lives saved

So she performed. She achieved. She saved a million babies while never once taking a full weekend off in four years. She told herself the babies couldn’t wait; therefore, she couldn’t rest. Every exhausted night, she repeated the same mantra: Embrace first, me second.

Until the day there was no more “me” to put second.

Rock Bottom, One-Way Ticket

The company was imploding. A deal fell through, then another. The company ran out of money. She tried to hand over the CEO role and was dragged back in. On that airplane, somewhere over the Pacific, she finally admitted the secret she had never dared say out loud:

“I don’t want to do this anymore.
And I hate myself for not wanting to do this anymore.”

That sentence is the hinge on which every great second act turns.

Because the moment you admit the thing you are most ashamed to feel is the moment the healing finally has room to begin.

What followed was four years of deliberate destruction and reconstruction:

• 10-day silent Vipassana retreats in the jungle

• MDMA-assisted therapy that finally let her feel the rage and grief she had outrun for decades

• Internal Family Systems work with Dick Schwartz

• Trauma therapy with Bessel van der Kolk (she stalked him until he said yes)

• Psychodrama circles where strangers played the ideal father she never had

• One unforgettable night of Amazonian frog poison that made her vomit everything she’d never said out loud

None of it was comfortable. All of it was necessary.

Jane Marie Chen on Passion Struck, live at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa

The Photograph That Ended the Search

The breakthrough came, as breakthroughs often do, in the least dramatic way possible. One afternoon, she picked up a photograph of herself at age five: solemn eyes, crooked bangs, clutching a stuffed animal. For years, she had been searching the world for someone to tell that little girl she was enough. Ideal fathers, perfect partners, standing ovations, a million saved babies: none of it worked.

So she looked at the picture and said it herself:

“I’m sorry you didn’t deserve that.
You were always worthy.
You were always loved.”

And for the first time in forty years, the little girl believed her.

That is the moment Jane understood the central lie we have all been sold: that if we just achieve enough, rescue enough, prove enough, the hole inside will finally fill. The truth is the opposite. The hole only fills when we stop trying to outrun it and finally turn around to look.

We Are Not the Wave

Jane closes her memoir with the line that now feels like the quietest battle cry I’ve ever heard:

“We are not the waves. We are the ocean.”

The wave rises, peaks, crashes, and dissolves.
The ocean simply receives it and keeps moving.

Jane’s company was eventually saved (Tony Robbins, moved by her raw honesty, became the investor who refused to let the mission die). She stepped down as CEO this year, the day Embrace reached its millionth baby. She now lives in Hawaii, surfs every morning, and coaches burned-out leaders who once thought surrender was the same as defeat.

She is living proof that falling apart is not the end of the story.
It is the only place the real story can begin.

So if you are reading this while secretly terrified that the life everyone envies is slowly killing you, hear this:

The wave you’ve been fighting is not your enemy.
It is the messenger you keep trying to outswim.

One day, you will be tired enough, honest enough, brave enough to stop kicking.

You will let it take you under.

And in the quiet beneath the thrashing, you will hear the voice you have been waiting your whole life to hear.

It will not come from a stage, a donor, a parent, or a partner.

It will come from you.

You got this.
You are enough.

And when you finally believe it, you will rise: not unbroken, but unmistakably whole.

Listen to the full conversation: Passion Struck, episode 694 with Jane Marie Chen. And if her story cracks something open in you, do the only thing that ever really helps: pass it on.

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