The debut memoir
Insecure
Overachiever
A Story of Ambition, Burnout and the Courage to Change Course
Coming February 23, 2027 · Girl Friday Productions
Preorder information coming soon.
The story
About the Book
Sabra has lived and died by the quality of her résumé since Pre-K, precisely as the daughter of an African immigrant father should. From Stanford to Silicon Valley, she fast-tracked her way to becoming one of the youngest engineering leaders at the Valley's most valuable startup. Outwardly, she navigated crises with cool, calm “executive presence.” Inwardly, she was falling apart—losing her hair, battling migraines, and teetering on the edge of a psychotic break from the imposter syndrome she carried all along.
When burnout hits, she doesn't rage-quit. Instead, she takes a page from her engineering playbook: debug the broken infrastructure within herself. Journaling sparks a dialogue between two inner voices—Intuition (a poised boardroom badass) and Insecurity (a chain-smoking cynic in sweatpants). Soon, their probing prompts her to take a sabbatical where she wades even deeper into the questions that she's spent decades avoiding: What if success isn't fulfillment? What if burnout is just a symptom of self-doubt? And what if she's too afraid to pause her momentum to search for what she truly wants?
SOON
Who it's for
You might find yourself in this book if…
- You're objectively successful but privately wondering, “Is this it?”
- You've burned out more than once and somehow keep recreating the conditions that got you there.
- You're afraid to walk away from something you're exceptionally good at.
- Your identity and self-worth have become tangled up with achievement.
- You don't really know what you want next—and aren't sure how to create enough space to find out.
- You want to rethink ambition without pretending ambition itself was a mistake.
- You suspect your burnout may be about more than workload.
- You've gotten very good at succeeding and are beginning to wonder what all the succeeding is actually for.
Insecure Overachiever is a memoir about ambition, burnout, self-doubt, achievement-based self-worth, career identity, and the search for fulfillment after professional success. It is written especially for high achievers who have built lives that look successful from the outside while quietly beginning to question whether those lives still feel like their own.
Along the way, it explores what Sabra calls Hero Syndrome: the fear, once you've proven you're capable, of no longer being exceptional.
Inside the book
What You'll Find Inside
Insecure Overachiever isn't traditional self-help. It's a memoir first: a deeply personal, often funny excavation of ambition, insecurity, work, identity, and the strange experience of getting what you thought you wanted.
But Sabra doesn't emerge from that excavation empty-handed.
Ten Fulfillment Features
Woven through the story are 10 Fulfillment Features—practices for finding your way back to what feels most true, and building a life that reflects it. Drawn from Sabra's own experiments with ambition, intuition, relationships, work, creativity, and meaning, these ideas lay the groundwork for listening more closely to yourself, questioning the biases you've inherited, and choosing your life with greater intention.
By the final page, readers will have a richer set of questions and ten practical features to consider as they design theirs.
In her words
Why I Wrote
This Book
I didn't wake up one morning and decide to write a book. Instead, I stumbled into writing one at the lowest point of my burnout.
I had started journaling mostly out of desperation—a way to make sense of what I was feeling when I no longer knew how to think my way out of it. On the page, I began to see just how relentlessly I had been pushing myself forward, and how quietly I had learned to absorb the cost.
Somewhere in all that writing, a story began to take shape. What started as an attempt to understand how I had gotten there slowly became a deeper question: What did I actually want, once I finally gave myself permission to stop?
This book grew out of trying to answer that question—and, as it turned out, writing it became part of the answer itself.
Early words
Praise for Insecure Overachiever
coming soon...
Book details