My Identity and I are on a break

For most of our adult lives, we are just the walking embodiment of our email signatures. You aren't "you" at a party; you’re a "Senior Program Manager" or a "Lead Strategist." You become a collection of KPIs, a LinkedIn headline, and a calendar full of meetings that could have been text messages. We treat our job titles like permanent tattoos, terrified that if we ever scrub them off, there won't be anything underneath except a blank resume.

It’s the ultimate imposter syndrome: If I’m not "the person who handles the crisis," then who am I? We fear that without the office validation, we’ll be like a character cut from a movie, just empty space on the screen. I have gone through this myself - 2025 December sitting across my confidant and wailing like a mad women asking this question “who would I be?”, “ what will I do” , “ I have no skills” ! but nonetheless, with their strong belief in me , I took the plunge …

But the moment I stepped away from the title, the silence was deafening. For years, I have used our work as a shortcut to explain who we are to the world. Without that shortcut, I did not know anymore how to answer the most terrifying question in the screenplay: If I’m not being "the professional," what am I actually being?

Realization creeps in slowly yet steadily - we cling to these roles because they’re easy scripts. They give us a clear motivation, a defined set of stakes, and a predictable plot. When you take that away, it feels like the director yelled "cut" but forgot to give you the next scene. You’re left standing on the stage, the lights are dimmed, and you’re still trying to remember your lines, even though the audience left hours ago.

And yet, there is a strange, quiet rebellion in that emptiness.

Your body, which has been performing the role of "the person who is always 'on,'" finally begins to reset. The phantom notifications stop buzzing in your pocket. Your thoughts, previously cluttered with the daily drama of the corporate grind, start to drift toward things that don't have a deadline, the kinds of things that wouldn't make sense in a quarterly report.

It made me realize that we fear the blank resume because we’ve been conditioned to believe that our value is an output, that “if we aren't "doing," we aren't "being." But here is the secret the machine doesn't want you to know: the most interesting version of you isn't the one that fits into a job description.

I want to tell all those High Performers, ( and I see a lot of them posting on LinkedIn and Insta) the ones who have taken that break without anything in hand, the fear is natural, but don’t give in just yet ….

That blank space on the resume isn't a void. It’s the first piece of honest writing you will do in years (Irony). It is the part of the script where the lead character stops taking orders from a director who doesn't even know their name and decides, finally, to write their own dialogue.

Maybe the "identity crisis" isn't a crisis at all. Maybe it’s just the moment you finally stop playing the extra in someone else’s production and start living the lead role in your own. The credits have rolled on the old character; it’s time to see what happens when the actor actually goes off-script.

Until next time … Thank You for reading and God Bless !