What Happens When You Lose Everything?
In my new memoir, Like a Wave We Break, I tell the story of a wipeout.
The monster wave came out of nowhere. It rose on the horizon and surged toward me, looking hungry. Furious. My heart hammered in my chest. Adrenaline shot through my veins like electricity.
Paddle! Paddle as fast as you can.
I dropped to my stomach, paddling frantically to get past the crest of the wave. A solid wall of blue towered in front of me, rising higher and higher. My arms sliced through the water with desperation. My shoulders and triceps burned as I tried to outpace a force so much bigger and stronger than I was. I was no match for the power of this wave.
The top of the wave began to curl, frothing with white foam. Just one more stroke, and you’ll be over the crest. Push, Jane. PUSH! My right arm exploded forward, as I threw everything I had into a final stroke. But it wasn’t enough. With a great thundering crash, the wave detonated, slamming into me with brutal force. I somersaulted backward and plunged violently underwater, hurtling toward the sharp rocks. The sea churned, spinning me, flinging my arms and legs like strands of kelp.
Everything went dark. I lost all sense of left and right, up and down.
This is the end. This is it.
Time slowed to a crawl, every second stretching out into an eternity. For a moment, I stopped struggling, and my body went limp. It would have been so easy to give up, to give in. But I gave one last push until finally, my head broke the surface. I gasped for air, coughing as I spit out seawater, my throat and nose burning. The horizon was spinning, the earth tilting and seesawing. I felt nauseous as I climbed back on my board and paddled toward what I thought was the shore. When I reached the sand, I collapsed.
You’re okay, I whispered to myself, trying to soothe my trembling body. It’s over. You’re fine now. But that was a lie. I wasn’t fine—not here, not anywhere.
At its core, a wave is pure energy moving through water. A wave breaks when that energy collides with something—a sandbar, the shore, the reef.
A wave breaking is energy reaching its end. Just as I had reached my end.
In graduate school, I was part of a team that invented a groundbreaking infant incubator for the world’s most vulnerable communities. I became the CEO of Embrace, a social enterprise that helped save hundreds of thousands of premature babies. There were some incredible highs along the way. I was invited to present our technology to President Obama at the White House. Beyoncé personally handed me a check to support our company. My job was more than a job. It was my purpose. My identity. The sole focus of my life. For a decade, I had sacrificed everything in my life to keep the company afloat—my time, my relationships, my sanity. Then, Embrace failed. I failed.
So yes, this is the story of a wipeout. Not just the one that left me shaking on the shore that day, but the collapse of the dream I'd poured my soul into. When it all came crashing down, I didn’t just lose a dream. I lost myself. And it sent me on a multiyear quest, in which I traded my dedication to my career for a different obsession: piecing myself back together. I became that woman. The one who saw signs in her morning tea leaves and planned her life based on vision boards and manifestations. I chased answers in the world’s most iconic waves. I sat in days of silent meditation in the Indonesian jungle, went on psychedelic journeys, and searched for my inner child in all the wrong places. I burned holes in my legs for an Amazonian frog poison ceremony to cleanse my soul. I went to every self-help seminar I could find. I even talked one of the world’s foremost trauma researchers into becoming my therapist.
If every journey begins with a call, mine came from within.
Fix me, it cried.
Save me, it pleaded.
What I came to learn is that true healing happens when we release the past. Not by forgetting, but by allowing our hearts to break wide open. By confronting our pain, instead of running from it. When we tend to the wounds we’ve inherited, we don’t just mend ourselves—we mend the generations that came before us and rewrite the possibilities for those who come after.
It is easy to believe that we are defined by our circumstances, by the wounds of our past, by family, by fate. But circumstances, however powerful, are just the waves—rising, crashing, ever-changing. Beneath their churning lies something steady. Infinite. No matter what we have endured, no matter where we’ve come from, our essence remains. And that essence is love—unconditional and limitless. We are not the waves but the sea itself.
The waves will always come. They will rise, they will crash, and at times they will pull me under. There will always be forces beyond my control, moments that threaten to swallow me whole. But now I know the way back. Back to the surface. Back to myself. When I wipe out, I know I will rise again—even when my lungs burn, even when my skin is scraped raw from the ocean floor. The voice that once taunted, You’re so stupid, you should die has been replaced by something softer, and stronger: You got this. You are enough.
I journeyed to the corners of the world, seeking the love I thought I was missing. I sought it in conference rooms and straw huts, in silent meditation retreats and crowded seminars, in therapy, in medicine. I searched for it in the rhythm of waves, in the fire of rituals, in the stillness and the storm. Only to discover it was always already within me. Love is not a distant shore; it’s the current that courses through us.
Healing is not about fixing ourselves. It’s about embracing who we are—the mess, the chaos, the grief, the fear, the heartbreak. It’s not about erasing our pain, but finding the courage to hold ourselves through it.
Like a wave, we break.
Like an ocean, we can never be broken.
Jane Marie Chen is an author, leadership coach, and co-founder & former CEO of Embrace Global, which has helped to save over 1 million babies with its groundbreaking portable incubator. This piece was excerpted from Like a Wave We Break by Jane Marie Chen Copyright © 2025 by Jane Chen. Excerpted by permission of Harmony. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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