The Roles We Play. And What Happens When You Finally Stop.

Somewhere around age seven I learned my first role.

Good daughter.

Quiet. Grateful. Not too much. Not too loud. Smile at the right moments. Don't cry at the wrong ones. Be the version of yourself that makes everyone around you comfortable enough to call you a good girl.

I was very good at it.

So good that by the time I was thirty I had added about eleven more roles on top of that first one and had absolutely no idea which one of them was actually me.

Good daughter. Good employee. Good friend. Slim enough. Successful enough. Independent enough. Senior enough. Always enough for everyone except somehow never quite enough for myself.

You know what nobody tells you about playing roles your whole life?

You get so good at the performance that you forget there's an audience. You start performing for nobody. You perform in empty rooms. You perform alone in your apartment at midnight still trying to be the version of yourself that somebody somewhere decided was acceptable.

I did this for almost twenty years in corporate finance.

Twenty years.

In finance because my father wanted that for me. Not because I wanted it. I wanted to understand people, not balance sheets. I wanted to sit across from someone who was falling apart and help them find the thread that would hold. Instead I learned OFAC regulations and climbed a ladder I never chose to be on.

And the ladder had rules. Very specific rules.

You start as junior. If within ten years you are not VP, you are worthless. If you are not pushing for the next title, the next salary band, the next performance review, you are lazy. If you have feelings in a meeting, you are unprofessional. If you are a woman with feelings in a meeting, you are hysterical.

So you perform. You perform the role of powerful career driven professional. You perform certainty when you have none. You perform strength when you are quietly dying. You perform the whole thing so consistently and so convincingly that people start to believe the performance is the person.

And then they start to resent you for it.

I had hundreds of colleagues over those twenty years. I was kind to all of them. I genuinely cared about the humans behind the job titles. I made friends everywhere I went.

And when I lost my job, not one of them called.

Not one.

Because I wasn't the Senior VP anymore. I was just a person. And a person without a title doesn't fit the role they needed me to play in their story either.

That was the day I understood something that broke me open.

I had never been loved for who I was. I had been loved for what I did. For how useful I was. And the moment I stopped being useful, I became invisible.

So I did the only thing left to do.

I stopped.

I stopped performing good daughter for a mother who was never going to see me anyway. I stopped performing Senior VP for a corporate world that would replace me before my desk was cold. I stopped performing fine for friends who needed me to be fine so they didn't have to feel anything inconvenient.

I turned everything off.

And I sat in the silence.

Now. I need to be honest with you about what that actually looked like.

Because when people talk about sitting with yourself and finding peace they usually describe candles and linen shirts and a beautiful journal open on a sunlit desk.

My silence looked like this.

An oversized hoodie I had not washed in two weeks. Cigarettes. Vodka. An apartment that looked like husaria had come through at full gallop and nobody had cleaned up after them. Curtains closed at 2pm. McDonald's bags on the counter next to pizza boxes from three days ago. My body slowly becoming an archive of every feeling I had refused to feel for twenty years, expressed entirely through processed food and alcohol and the particular kind of stillness that is not peace but exhaustion.

I was a complete disaster.

And here is the thing about being a complete disaster that nobody puts on a motivational poster.

It was necessary.

Not the vodka specifically. The vodka was eventually a problem I had to address because you cannot start thinking clearly when you are drinking to stop thinking. You cannot hear yourself when you are using substances to silence yourself. At some point the anaesthetic stops working anyway and you are left with the same feelings you started with, just slightly more dehydrated and considerably less dignified.

I had to quit drinking to start thinking. That's not a metaphor. That's just what happened.

And when I decided to stop, I didn't do it gently.

I threw a bomb into my own life.

One day I quit everything at once. The alcohol. The cigarettes. The McDonald's. The people who were making me smaller. The habits that had been holding the whole disaster together like a very unhealthy scaffolding. I started new ones the same week. Movement. Silence. Honesty. Water. Cats on lap as mandatory daily therapy.

Most people would say that's insane. You're supposed to take it one step at a time. One small change. Build slowly.

That's not who I am.

I am the woman who, when she finally decides something, burns the whole thing down and builds from the ash. Sometimes literally.

I don't recommend it for everyone. But for me it was the only way. Half measures had never worked because half of me was always still performing. Halfway out is just a different kind of stuck.

So I went all the way out. All at once. And then I sat in the silence and waited to see who I actually was without any of it.

But the disaster itself before that decision. The unwashed hoodie and the closed curtains and the apartment that looked like a crime scene. That was the cocoon. That was my nervous system finally saying you have been performing for thirty years and I am done and we are going to lie here until we are ready to be something different.

The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by trying harder. It dissolves first. Completely. Into something that looks like nothing useful at all.

I was the liquid stage.

Not forever. But for long enough.

Slowly, over weeks that felt like years, I started to hear something underneath all the noise and the vodka and the shame about the vodka and the pizza boxes.

Me. The actual me. Who had been waiting patiently under all those roles for someone to stop performing long enough to notice her.

She had opinions. Strong ones. About the life she wanted. About Thailand and cats and writing and sitting with other women who were also trying to figure out which parts of themselves were real and which parts were costumes they had forgotten to take off.

She was funny. Funnier than I had let myself be in years because funny didn't always fit the roles.

She was angry. Rightfully so.

She was tender in a way that the Senior VP had learned to hide so carefully I had nearly lost access to it entirely.

She was me. Finally. Just me.

Here is what I want you to know if something in this feels familiar.

The roles are not you. They never were. They were costumes someone handed you at the door of your own life and you put them on because you were seven years old and you wanted to be loved and you didn't know yet that love wasn't supposed to come with conditions.

You are allowed to take them off.

Not all at once. Not perfectly. Not without a period that looks, from the outside, like an absolute mess.

The mess is part of it. The mess might even be the most important part.

Because you cannot build something true on top of a performance. You have to clear the stage first.

Even if clearing the stage involves an oversized hoodie and a lot of pizza.

Especially then.

What role are you most tired of playing?

Tell me in the comments. I read every single one. 🪶

Full story on the blog. Link in bio.

rise · believe · fly

From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you're exactly where you're supposed to be.