🍰 Finally making peace with a business that failed after two years of trying

Two years ago I left a stable job to start a small business, a home baking operation that I genuinely believed had real potential given how well it started, decent early orders, some good word of mouth in the first few months, enough momentum that leaving the job felt like a reasonable calculated risk rather than a reckless one at the time I actually made that decision. The reality over the following eighteen months turned out to be a lot harder than the promising start suggested it would be, rising ingredient costs that ate into margins more than I had properly accounted for early on, a couple of larger bulk orders that fell through at the last minute after I had already bought ingredients specifically for them, and a slow but steady decline in repeat orders that I kept assuming would recover the next month, right up until it genuinely did not. I finally shut it down about six weeks ago, and the financial hit was real, most of my savings from the previous job went into keeping it running longer than I probably should have, hoping each month that the next one would turn things around. For a while after closing it, I felt a kind of failure I had not really experienced before, not just about the money, but about having told friends and family confidently for two years that this was going to work out. What has actually helped somewhat recently is a mentor figure I met through a local business group telling me that most people who eventually build something successful failed at least once first, which I intellectually already knew but had not really felt as true until someone said it directly to me about my own specific situation. I am back to job hunting now, treating the two years as a genuinely expensive but real education rather than pure waste, though some days that framing feels more convincing than others depending on how the job search itself is going that particular week. Has anyone else gone through a failed business attempt and actually reached a point of genuine peace with it, and roughly how long did that actually take for you?

Closed a small retail venture myself three years ago after eighteen months of hoping the next month would fix things, and the shame lasted far longer than the actual financial hit did if I am honest about it now. What helped eventually was one older relative telling me plainly that every single business he ever respected had at least one failure sitting quietly behind it somewhere.