A few years ago, I walked away from a career in design that looked, from the outside, like it was working pretty well. Leaving felt like free-falling. I had no language for what was happening and no one around me seemed to be asking the same questions I was. That passage from stable professional identity to complete uncertainty eventually became the foundation of my coaching practice. I’ve now spent over 210 hours sitting with people navigating career change, identity grief and the slow, disorienting work of rebuilding a sense of self when the old scaffolding has come down.

It’s been one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done. Which is why it caught me off guard when I started feeling a strange distance from it all.

I’ve referred a few clients to essays about career change on this platform. I’ve watched them light up with recognition and felt genuinely happy for them, while also noticing some distance in myself. Their story still mattered. It just didn’t feel like mine anymore.

My interests are shifting. I’m curious about what building a business stirs up in the person building it. The fears it surfaces. The relational patterns it reveals. The way entrepreneurship becomes, if you let it, a vehicle for inner work.

The rush to name what's next is a familiar impulse. I see it in myself and I see it all around me. There’s a growing community of people who’ve left traditional careers and found real camaraderie in naming themselves differently. Multi-passionate. Portfolio careerist. Squiggly. These terms validate experiences that the old model had no room for, and they give people permission to stop pretending they need to fit neatly into a single box.

What I find myself wondering, though, is whether some of us are trading one form of over-identification for another. You leave a career you’d fused with — The Strategist, The Engineer, The Head of — and then you fuse with the leaving itself. Multi-passionate becomes the new badge. The label changes but the grip stays the same.

Here I am, three years into a coaching practice, feeling my own centre of gravity shift again. I first started writing about this shift here.

Career change was the window people walked through to find me, and it remains a genuinely difficult emotional threshold to cross.

The first time my professional identity dissolved, I was terrified. I didn’t trust myself. This time, the discomfort is familiar and I know it doesn’t mean something is wrong with me. I know the impulse to grab a new label and hold on tight is an old Part that just needs some compassion and reassurance from the Self. The most honest place to stand is in the space between what you’ve been and the thing you haven’t yet earned the right to name.

These shifts happen in seasons. The first time the rug gets pulled, you think you’ll never find solid ground again. The second time, you recognise the terrain and trust yourself more, because you’ve survived not knowing before.

I remind myself that coach, facilitator, writer, community builder aren’t who I am, they’re just what I’m doing in this season of life. The moment I grip any of them too tightly is the moment I stop being available for whatever wants to come next.

Melyssa Griffin built a wildly successful online business, then shut it down to open a bookstore in Lisbon. I think about that sometimes. To trust that the next thing doesn’t have to justify the last one.

The real skill isn’t reinvention. It’s the willingness to keep loosening your grip on the identity and the story you’ve been telling about yourself, and to stay curious about what remains when you do.

Earlier this year, I let go of freelance design work I'd been doing for a startup. It wasn't a difficult client or bad work, it just stopped feeling like mine. The relief was immediate. Sometimes the clearest sign you've outgrown something is how little grief there is when you finally put it down. What have you let go of recently, and how did it feel once you did?

About Work Worth Doing

Work Worth Doing is a space for people who’ve outgrown a professional career they’ve spent years building, and aren’t sure about what comes next. You’ll find essays on identity, purpose and finding fulfilment outside of work too.

I work 1:1 with people transitioning from a professional career into meaningful work. To learn more about how coaching can support you, book a consultation or learn more below.