Episode #055 · Cara Chace
We Can Do Hard Things…But At What Cost?
Cara Chace knows how to do hard things.
She spent years as a Special Agent working high-stakes cases, walked away from a stable government career without knowing exactly what would come next, built a successful business, and later faced a period when her health forced her to step away from work altogether.
But this conversation isn't really about whether we can do hard things. It's about the questions that can surface when being capable, productive, and good under pressure becomes part of how we understand ourselves—and what happens when the life we've become very good at living starts asking something different from us.
What a Career in Law Enforcement Asked of Her
Cara’s first career had the kind of progression that makes sense on a résumé.
After interning with the former U.S. Customs Service in college, she was hired as a Special Agent. She expected it to be a 25-year career: high-stakes work, specialized training, investigations, and the opportunity to protect people and make a difference.
Some of it was as exciting as it sounds. Cara worked cases involving narcotics, fraud, illegal arms and technology exports, and child exploitation. But for every hour spent serving warrants or working an operation, she estimates there were ten hours of reports, documents, and investigative work behind the scenes.
The harder part to explain was what the job required emotionally.
“You have to be able to compartmentalize,” she tells me.
Cara learned to absorb disturbing information, make decisions quickly, and move on to whatever the job required next. She describes fight-or-flight as something that already felt familiar to her, which made her particularly well suited to the work. She could put difficult things into a box and keep functioning. But the boxes didn't disappear.
The work also changed the way she moved through the world. She was constantly evaluating people and situations, looking for what could go wrong, and exposed to parts of human behavior most people rarely encounter.
By the time Cara began thinking seriously about leaving, she wasn't simply tired of a demanding job. She was looking ahead at what another 20 years of doing that work might require her to become.
Knowing You Want to Leave Years Before You Actually Do
Cara knew she wanted to leave law enforcement three years before she was able to do it. There wasn't one dramatic breaking point. She had experienced a series of difficult supervisors, but there were practical considerations, too. She lived in San Diego, needed her income, and couldn't simply walk away from the career she'd built.
More than anything, she couldn't imagine what staying for 25 years might require of her.
“I can't imagine doing this to myself or my body for 25 years,” she remembers thinking.
When I ask who she would have needed to become to stay, Cara doesn't hesitate: numb. Cynical. Someone who viewed everyone in the worst possible light.
By the time Cara and her husband moved to Oregon, she was considering possibilities ranging from real estate to insurance. Then an interest she had no reason to consider a career led somewhere she never could have planned.
Cara had rediscovered Megadeth, joined the band's fan club, and noticed that they weren't taking advantage of what was then the early world of social media. So she started making suggestions.
From Special Agent to Social Media Manager
Cara initially volunteered to moderate Megadeth's social media accounts. Eventually, that turned into managing 13 million fans across 17 accounts for the band, Dave Mustaine, and others associated with them.
It sounds like a wild career departure until Cara describes what actually made her good at it.
“I just notice things.”
The analytical instincts she'd developed and relied on as an investigator translated surprisingly well to marketing. Cara was good at studying human behavior, spotting patterns, pulling useful information from large amounts of input, and looking outside an industry for ideas she could apply within it.
She hadn't studied marketing. She hadn't deliberately retrained for an obvious second career. She discovered the transferability of her skills by using them somewhere completely different.
There was still an identity adjustment underneath the career change. Going from Senior Special Agent to social media manager meant leaving behind a title that had dictated much of Cara's life.
But her next roles gave her new titles to grab onto. After Megadeth came entrepreneurship and her own digital marketing agency. It wasn't until years later that Cara had to confront what happened when there was no professional title waiting to replace the last one.
What Happens When You Can No Longer Push Through
Cara had spent years feeling physically unwell while continuing to function.
She attributed much of it to life: stress, children, moving, running a business, having too many plates spinning at once.
“But I'm a high performer,” she remembers thinking. “I can deal with it. Like, look at me go.”
Eventually, her health deteriorated to the point that functioning normally was no longer possible. There were days when Cara could choose one thing: make dinner, pull weeds, do laundry, or possibly complete something for her business. She decided to put the business down entirely.
Cara had already left federal law enforcement, walked away from Megadeth, changed careers, built a company, and moved states. She says stopping work was harder than all of it.
“If I'm not even working, who am I and what good am I?”
The pause felt deeply disorienting. Cara describes it like a police traffic break: everything behind her needed to stop. Even after creating that boundary, she didn't know what to do with herself.
She journaled. She ruminated. Ideas for what might come next began forming within a few months, but she allowed herself to leave them there rather than immediately turning them into something productive.
For nearly two years, someone accustomed to being able to handle almost anything had to build a life around the reality that she couldn't.
Redefining Success
Cara eventually returned to her business, but her relationship with work had changed. She's spent much of her career proving she can handle hard things. Now she's much more interested in deciding which things are worth handling at all.
That has changed how she thinks about her business, marketing, ambition, and what she wants from this stage of her career. She's moving toward work as an author and speaker—the same desire to become an author that she remembers having as a child.
“There were a lot of side quests to get here,” she says.
Her definition of success has shifted, too. She wants meaningful work and financial contribution. She also wants the ability to take a Tuesday off because she feels like it. She doesn't want employees simply because growing a business says she should have them.
And despite everything Cara has already figured out, she's still living inside a familiar question.
She's in the middle of becoming an author and speaker, and she doesn't yet feel she has enough evidence that this version will work.
“Is this gonna work? Can I pull this off?”
Cara Chace
Cara Chace is an author and burnout coach helping women entrepreneurs build sustainable, anti-hustle businesses without trashing their nervous systems. She built what she wishes she'd had when she burned out — because the planners, the productivity hacks, and the color-coded calendars left her more exhausted and more behind than when she started. She's the host of the Ditch the Chaos podcast, the forthcoming author of The Social Media Burnout Cure (September 2026), and a 10-year entrepreneur who runs her business from home with margin, intention, and a deep aversion to hustle culture.
