The part about pivoting they don’t talk about is the unraveling of your identity. When you spend decades building a career, you are confronted with the idea of who am I without the attachments of the connections we make along the way, being a part of a collective of humans on a mission, the community we built, the life we fought for. Now it is all in the past. But it still remains in many ways. And sometimes it is haunting, and many times you will long for it because it is your comfort zone.
Shifting careers takes courage. Warrior-level courage. Because you are starting over, yes, you have acquired skills and knowledge you did not have before, but you no longer have the network you once had.
It is like leaving a church you grew up in. Yes, you learned the word, but you were also a part of like-minded people. But now you are the new kid in class. In an established class that is not always welcoming. You have to learn a new environment and, most importantly, you have to learn yourself.
Asking the hard questions like why am I doing this, and really doing the inner work to discover who you are.
Self-discovery from this perspective is more than just finding out what colors look best on your complexion. It is really an exploration of your story and journey of life. We are all here for a purpose, but many simply follow the path of the American Dream. Build a life that fits into the box of society and its many expectations.
We talk about freedom, but we don’t often talk about its cost. When we begin to unravel all that we have built, it can be isolating and lonely. Not because you don’t have people who love you, but when entering the chrysalis stage of life, it is challenging to be in the mindset for same mindset as before. Life before begins to feel foreign, and you begin to feel out of place, and you begin to redefine who you are and your place in the world.
It can feel like depression, and maybe parts of it are, but what is happening on a cellular level is that your identity is peeling off, and the work is to ask the question of how this identity was created and why. When we are pivoting, we believe the same person goes with us everywhere, but the reality is that who you were no longer fits. We are reminded of a tree as it grows. For a tree to expand, the old bark must be removed itself. As natural beings, we go through the same process.
Beginning with self-examination, recalibrating our vision, and then building the expansion plan. We can either invent another identity or uncover the truth of who we are. I chose the latter. My self-exploration began a journey of uncovering my truth. Who am I without proximity to the life I created? Who am I, not attached to the network I built? Who am I, not surrounded by the life I felt comfortable in? What I learned is that it was not about building. It was about surrender.
Surrendering to my purpose and allowing the soul God created to be introduced to myself. I had to introduce myself to myself.
Who is she? This is the girl I hid from the world to fit in. The girl I suppressed to get along. She is a big personality, highly intelligent, and smarter than the average bear. She is not of this world and sees life differently from others. But that is the person I hid for years, and as I grew up, I buried her because it did not feel safe to allow her to be seen.
But here I am. Life does not look like I expected when I walked away from my career, but I can say that I have released the identity that said I needed proximity to have value.
Now I am just me, the messy smart girl who knows the matrix is real and understands that we have the power to bypass it to live a truly authentic life.
Monica Wisdom
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Great Job monicaamplified@gmail.com & the Team @ Black Women Amplified | Podcast | Storytelling | Personal Development | Journals Source link for sharing this story.
