I Was Very Good at a Life That Was Not Mine
Twenty years is a long time to be excellent at the wrong thing.
I had the title. The kind that looks good on LinkedIn and makes your parents proud at dinner parties. The kind that means nothing at 3am when you are lying awake wondering how you got here and whether this is all there is.
I was good at it. Genuinely good. And for a long time I confused being good at something with being meant for it.
That is a trap nobody warns you about.
The corporate world has a very specific way of keeping you. It is not chains. It is not even money, though that helps. It is identity. You become the title. The role. The function. You stop knowing where the job ends and you begin.
I spent twenty years being the title first and a human being somewhere after that.
Every Sunday evening had that specific dread. The kind that good sleep does not fix. The kind that a holiday only postpones. The kind that your body sends you as a message you keep refusing to open.
I refused for a long time. Because what was the alternative? Walk away from twenty years? From the salary, the status, the version of myself that other people recognised and respected?
Yes. As it turned out. That was exactly the alternative.
The day it ended I was not even in the room. Someone made the decision for me. One phone call. Thirty seconds. Twenty years, done.
Honestly? My body felt relief before my brain caught up with what had just happened. Which probably tells you everything you need to know about how wrong that life was for me.
And then came the question I was not prepared for.
Who are you when you are not the job?
I did not know. After twenty years I genuinely did not know. I had been so busy being good at someone else's dream that I had never stopped to ask what mine looked like.
That was the most terrifying and honest moment of my life. Standing in the silence of a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be and no title to hide behind.
I am still figuring it out. I will not pretend otherwise.
But here is what I know now that I did not know then. The exhaustion I felt was not from working too hard. It was from working completely in the wrong direction. Every step forward in that career was a step away from myself.
Stopping felt like failure. It was actually the first true thing I had done in twenty years.
If you are sitting in a job that fits perfectly on paper and feels completely wrong in your body, I am not going to tell you to quit. I am just going to tell you that the feeling you keep dismissing is not weakness.
It is information. And it has been trying to reach you for a long time.
rise · believe · fly 🪶
From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.