Standing in the Quiet Between Who I Was and Who I Am Becoming

A story about being fired, untangling work from worth, and starting over.

For most of my adult life, my work has been closely tied to my identity. If you asked me who I was, I would start with what I do and maybe, if there was time left, get around to everything else.

That is a strange thing to admit, because my kids and my family mean the world to me. They are not an afterthought. But I was raised to believe that work equals worth. That I am not enough just being me. Rather, I am my achievements, and that belief has settled deep into the fabric of how I move through the world.

Lately, that equation has started to crack. And as it shifts, it is tugging on other parts of who I am too. It feels less like I am just changing jobs and more like I am slowly untangling my entire identity.

Back in May, I took a position with a company that looked perfect on paper. It checked all the boxes: mission driven, supporting under-resourced communities, aligned with the population that is nearest and dearest to my heart. It looked like the job I had been working toward for years.

Until I actually got inside.

The longer I was there, the more it felt like a familiar nonprofit story. An organization saying all the right words about equity and support while quietly exploiting the very people it claimed to serve. If you have known me for five minutes, you know I have never been amazing at just getting on board. I have a stubborn habit of standing on my convictions, which has been both a professional blessing and a curse.

One day, without warning, the curse side won.

I got a call from HR telling me I was fired. No performance plan. No negative review. Just done. It felt like someone took a pair of scissors to a life I had spent years stitching together.

I asked for a meeting with the CEO immediately. Two days later, we sat down. Suddenly the narrative changed. They did not actually want me to leave. Instead, they offered me a different role in HR, where my job would be to support leaders, after making it very clear that I was not good enough to be one.

The hypocrisy was infuriating. At one point, the CEO told me it had been her plan to bring me back as a 1099 after my severance ran out. The message was loud and clear. We value what you can do for us, just not your voice, your boundaries, or your belief that the people we serve should not be collateral damage.

I have tried to get comfortable with the idea of staying. I have turned it over in my head and tried to see if there was a version of this story where I swallow the frustration, take the safe option, and make it work.

I cannot.

Since all of this, I have started putting out feelers for consulting projects, and here is the wild part. They are coming. Today, I interviewed with a CEO and was offered twenty to forty hours of consulting work a month. On Sunday, a friend who runs a consulting company reached out to me out of the blue. These are not full answers or guaranteed futures, but they feel like small, steady yeses, that my soul so needs right now.

For the first time, I feel like I am entering a season where I am supposed to choose work that works for my family, instead of forcing my family to work around my job. That sentence alone feels radical to write. My whole identity has been built on being the reliable one, the fixer in broken systems, the person who can make it work no matter how unreasonable the ask.

Now I am wondering what it would look like to be the person who does not make it work when it should never have been hers to carry in the first place. I am also quietly asking what it means for my kids to see me choose differently. Not more hours. Not a bigger title. Just a life that does not always put my worth in the hands of an employer.

And under all of that, there are other shifts starting to move. Some of them have nothing to do with a job description and everything to do with how I see myself, what I want, and what I am no longer willing to pretend is fine. I am not ready to write about all of that yet, but I can feel the fault lines. This is one thread in a much larger unraveling.

I do not have a neat bow to tie on this. I am somewhere between the old self that has never quite fit and the new one that has not arrived yet. It feels like a pause, but not a bad one. More like that quiet, wobbly moment between exhale and inhale.

If you have ever had your dream job turn on you, or realized that the thing you were most proud of about yourself was also what was burning you out, you are not alone. If your work identity is cracking and you are starting to question other parts of who you are too, I am right there with you.

If this resonates with you, or makes you think of someone who might need it, would you share it with them or pass this newsletter along. This little corner of the internet is where I am trying to make sense of these shifts in real time, and it means a lot to know I am not the only one standing at this crossroads.