Somewhere between my annual promotion and my endless weekly reviews, I began to forget what I wanted.
Not just what I wanted from work – but what I wanted from myself. The shape of my days, the sound of my own voice, the things that used to pull me in like a tide. The things I didn’t need to be good at, only in love with.
At first, I didn’t notice. Forgetting doesn’t arrive like thunder. It slips in quietly. I stopped asking certain questions. I adjusted my tone in meetings. I learned which parts of me were welcome and which ones caused too much friction.
I got very good at being useful. I got even better at being agreeable. And then one day, sitting in yet another meeting filled with sentences that floated past without landing anywhere in me, I heard a thought so clear it startled me.
I don’t want a growth plan. I want a map of where I lost myself.
I used to love the sea.
There’s a beach close to where I lived once, I haven’t returned to in years. It wasn’t curated or quiet. It was loud. Messy. Stubborn.
At thirty, I used to go there with a notebook and a bag of bad ideas. I was still stupid enough to think I had time. Stupid enough to believe that writing things down could keep them real. The beach wasn’t beautiful. The sand stuck to everything. The water was always warmer than expected. But it gave me something I haven’t felt in a long time – the permission to be completely unproductive.
Then a few months ago I went back to a beach and I remember walking back to my room with my skin still burning and my heart slowed down just enough to feel the wind again. I felt like someone who had just come home to herself. I don’t remember deciding to become the kind of person who no longer goes to the beach.
But I became her anyway. And I lost a part of me until recently.
There was no one moment of betrayal.
No dramatic fork in the road. No clean before-and-after. I wanted to be a version of me that fits. Just a slow and mostly polite erasure. A few compromises here, a few silences there. A slide rewritten to sound more on-brand. A sentence deleted before sending because it might be too much.
A decision not to speak in a room full of people who wouldn’t have heard me anyway. I started saying “I don’t mind” when I did.
I started saying “I’m good with whatever” because I had grown tired of defending the part of me that wasn’t. And somewhere along the way, I stopped needing to be right. Not because I had grown wiser. But because I had grown tired.
No one asked me to disappear.
But I learned how to vanish without leaving the room.
This wasn’t burnout. Until it was.
I told myself I was just busy. Just tired. Just in a phase.
But then came the days when I couldn’t stop crying in the car, in parking lots, in bathroom stalls. The panic attacks that showed up quietly and without drama, like an old friend who doesn’t knock. There were mornings I opened my laptop and stared at the screen until the minutes blurred into hours. I answered emails in a tone that felt foreign. I wrote strategy documents with no memory of what I had just typed.
I wasn’t breaking down. That would’ve been visible. I was slowly dissolving.
People still told me I seemed calm. Still complimented my clarity.
But I felt like someone playing the part of a person who had once cared.
I began to envy those who felt anger, frustration, even boredom. At least they were still inside their bodies. I wasn’t. I was floating just above mine, nodding in meetings, saying the right things, remembering to smile in all-hands calls.
I didn’t hate my job. That would’ve been easier.
I just didn’t know how to feel anything inside it anymore.
I kept imagining escape.
Not a new job. Not a sabbatical. Not therapy. Something stranger. More elemental.
I kept picturing the beach. I imagined walking into the water with my clothes still on, letting the sea strip away everything – the deadlines, the branding, the carefulness, the parts of me I had shaped for other people’s comfort.
I wanted to lose myself in something real. Not forever. Just long enough to remember that I still existed outside of being efficient.
Some days, I still show up like nothing is wrong.
I smile. I present the work. I update the roadmap. I drop in the right number of exclamation marks to suggest enthusiasm.
But more and more, I found myself pausing mid-sentence. Not because I’ve forgotten what I was saying, but because I can feel the old self returning.
The one who was inconvenient and alive. The one who asked questions that made rooms uncomfortable.
The one who wasn’t performing competence for the sake of safety.
She still exists. A little bruised, but intact.
And she’s still waiting by the sea.
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” Said E. E. Cummings
If you’ve ever wondered where the old version of you went – not the ambitious one, not the efficient one, but the one who felt fully alive in her own skin – you’re not alone.
I work with people in the middle of that question.
Not to fix them.
But to help them build the kind of map that doesn’t fit in a slide deck.
Let’s talk, and help build each other a version for now.