Written by Lilach Bullock
The year my body and my business both gave out
Covid killed the agency I had built. My back, which had been giving me warning shots for years, finally gave out: a herniated disc that put me in a wheelchair. From there I moved to a walking stick. Somewhere in that same stretch I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and the weight piled on to what doctors class as morbid obesity. The pain brought on a depression I did not see coming, and I let everything go for about two years: income, most of my contacts, the version of myself I recognised in the mirror.
I was too unwell to even notice that my website’s SEO was falling apart underneath me while I was not looking. Then, on top of all of that, a war started outside my window, and I found myself running what business I had left through nightly air raid sirens.
How I stopped the spiral
Somewhere in the middle of all that I picked up one habit that ended up doing more work than any doctor or business plan I had. I started asking myself: is that true, or is it a story I am telling myself? Not affirmations, not positive thinking, just that one check before I let a thought run away with me and decide the rest of my day.
When it was just noise, I put it down. When something needed doing, I did the smallest fact-based thing in front of me that day, not the whole frightening picture.
What losing 55 kilos slowly, with no shortcuts, taught me
Three years ago I quit refined sugar completely. I would call myself a chocolate addict before that, and the first six weeks were grim in a way I had not expected. There was no shortcut version of what came after. I lost the 55 kilos slowly, over months and then years, not weeks.
Early on I was timing pain on short walks before I could manage anything that counted as real exercise. Walking came first, then walking further, then weights, then hiking. Now I run. My diabetic markers reversed along the way, and I am fitter and stronger now than at any other point in my life. None of it happened on a schedule I could have predicted from week one, and I stopped expecting it to.
Watching a decade of income vanish in a quarter, and what I did on day one
For about a decade, sponsored content on my website brought in somewhere between five and seven thousand dollars a month, fairly steady, the kind of income you stop questioning. In late 2025 it stopped almost overnight. The sponsors who depend on those numbers walked. A decade of income, gone within a quarter.
Day one was not a plan, if I am honest. The old model was dead; sponsors do not stay when the traffic numbers look wrong to them, whatever the reason behind it. I stopped trying to patch the same site back together and started rebuilding the model out loud, in public, rather than pretending the loss had not happened.
From 937 clicks to position 15
I rebuilt my entire lead generation system from scratch that year, after the two years my health had taken from me, and I wrote publicly about what worked and what I wasted time on, rather than smoothing it into a tidy success story. On my own website, traffic had fallen from around 4,700 clicks a month to 937 at the lowest point. I combined a big push of AI-assisted publishing with real indexation work and an editorial pass on everything before it went live.
My average Google position moved from about 41 to 15 within six months, and the clicks started climbing again. On the income side, I tracked the numbers from their lowest point in February through to July, and passive income grew 573 percent over that stretch, with July alone bringing in 37 completed paid jobs from repeat demand, not one big client saving the month.
What I would tell the version of me who was still in the wheelchair
Running a business through nightly air raid sirens is not something you get used to; you just keep working through it, and my husband broke his ribs falling off his bike during one of the worst weeks of sirens mid-project, and the work still had to get done that week too.
I still run our household finances across three currencies on a dashboard I built myself, and I still ask the same question before I spend anything on the business now: is this earning back what it costs? That question did not exist for me before the wheelchair.
Author Bio:
Lilach Bullock is an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO with 21 years in marketing. She helps business owners put AI to work across content, SEO, social media, email marketing, automation and lead generation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, WIRED, HuffPost and the Content Marketing Institute, and she has worked with Twitter, IBM, Dropbox, monday.com, Hootsuite and Greenpeace. Forbes named her a Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer worldwide. Based in Israel, she works with US, UK and international clients.
