My Path Suddenly Ended

For me, 2025 felt like being flushed down the toilet: there was lots of change, lots of chaos, the challenges of scaling a business, burnout, betrayals, moving my whole life overseas, and mental health struggles that shook my self-confidence to the core. 2025 made me question whether I was really on the right path.

That was the constant question on my mind – how do you know that you are on the right path?

On the outside, I was building a meaningful business, being actively involved in my community and church, and pursuing an exciting opportunity with my wife to move to Vienna. These have all been wonderful things that have made 2025 so precious.

But there was an invisible cost to all of these things. Behind closed doors I was weeping with self-doubt. I had watched as part of my business, which I made to serve the community, which I had worked so hard for almost 2 years to build, was nearly taken from me. I experienced burnout, had sleepless nights, and the passionate spark that people had described as “so Caspian”, was quickly fading.

If that wasn’t difficult enough, moving to a new country with a new language, knowing no one, with my income dropping significantly was the perfect recipe to feel completely lost. After working harder than I ever had, and investing in a community that was now on the other side of the world, the path in front of me suddenly ended.

Days blurred together. I spent a lot of time in-doors, doom-scrolling, feeling stressed, depressed, anxious, and eating copious amounts of white chocolate. I had the opportunity to explore a whole new world on my doorstep, but I lacked the impetus, because quite frankly, it was more comfortable to ignore how I was feeling, to avoid asking for help, and to numb myself with meaningless short-form content. All the while, I was internally struggling to know what to do next.

Then, on one particular morning of excessive doom-scrolling, I came across Poet David Whyte’s quote:

How do you know that you are on your path? – because it disappears… Because you can’t see where you are going. That’s how you know. And everything you have lent on for your identity has gone. And so you are going to enter the black contemplative splendours of self-doubt, at the same time as you are setting out on this radical new path.

Though initially tempted to scoff cynically, I was checkmated. I held onto those words in desperate hope. Like a pebble in my shoe, I couldn’t stop thinking about how being lost might bring an opportunity to be found again.

It took months of getting used too, and some days were just about surviving. But I’ve survived nonetheless, and 2026 has been a welcome fresh start. I couldn’t have gotten through last year without my amazing wife, my friends, family, counsellors, pastors, and my mentors. They constantly reminded me that I would get through.

No one was able to hand me the blueprint of what my path forwards would look like at every step, but I have learned that the path forwards is about maintaining your integrity, and following purpose. It is to keep the ball rolling, even if it rolls downhill sometimes.

And afterwards, being lost isn’t so scary when you remember why you are there in the first place. For me, it has always been about making music, building community, and cherishing the people and relationships that God has placed in my life. And sometimes the path is foggy, but you have to take a step forwards to see what lies ahead.

And often, when going in the right direction, it can end up more beautiful and exciting than you could have ever imagined.