“I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t performing.”
That line of MC’s is about more than overcapacity and collapse — it’s about the identity running underneath the hurt. Take the performing away and it doesn’t reveal a rested version of you. It reveals a question: who am I when no one is keeping score? When nobody’s checking my grades to be sure I got the A, or judging how I played on the field, or ranking my art against the kids who didn’t even want to be drawing — when nobody’s asking why I can’t be more like ____.
This is the second time MC’s been on The Divergent Talent Alchemist. She’s a former international lawyer, late-diagnosed, who last time told us about sleeping in dorms at the office and hundred-hour weeks. Seven months later she’s past fourteen hundred subscribers on The Reframe Diaries and building something I can’t wait for you to see because it is special, differentiated, and something that I needed 6 years ago when I was first diagnosed with ADHD.
One thing up front: I’m not going to retell MC’s story for her. She lives it, and she tells it better than I ever could. You can read her own reflection on this conversation — or watch it, listen to it, or read the transcript, it’s all in the same place — in whatever way fits how you take things in. What I want to do here is different: name the patterns underneath what we talked about and tell you what they’ve cost and taught me. That’s the part that’s mine to give.
A note before we go further: we went to some heavy places — inpatient care, suicidal ideation, burnout, being pushed out of a job. If today isn’t the day for that, come back when it is. The work will keep.
If you’re struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) is available 24/7 in the US; international lines are at findahelpline.com.
Here’s where we wander:
what you smuggle out with you when you leave corporate
the ruler nobody remembers handing you: worth equals output
what happens when you try to monetize the thing that was keeping you alive
whistleblowing, getting pushed out, and the rage with nowhere to go
rebuilding a voice — and a nervous system — that’s yours
Nobody hands you a memo or a map
When I left corporate, the first thing I did was build a website. A real one — logo, tagline, the works — branding myself as an HR professional, which is funny in hindsight, because I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do HR. I’d spent years learning that you show up with a title and a deck and an answer ready, so I made myself a title and a deck and called it a plan. Nobody hands you the script for the part that comes after the leaving. You build the most convincing version of it you can, then stand inside it wondering why it fits like an itchy costume.
MC didn’t get a clean exit or a map either and when she joined Substack, she spent her first six months just figuring out who she was on the page. The performance most of us ran was survival: operate at a high level under pressure, then go recruit the evidence that you did well — the numbers, the proof, the receipts that say you’re worth something. Take the pressure away and the receipts stop printing, and you’re left in a quiet you don’t recognize.
Leaving is logistics — the resignation email, the handoff, the awkward shaped box of your office trinkets, the involuntary offboarding call, or the last swipe of the badge. The unlearning is the actual work, and it doesn’t start until the building is behind you and the quiet sets in.
The ruler nobody remembers handing you
The thing that, to me, is the whole conversation: how hard it is to value the qualitative over the quantitative which MC pointed out. Someone writes to tell you your words reached them, and it doesn’t quite land — not because you don’t care, but because years of corporate taught you that worth is something you count. I know that ruler intimately; I spent years inside organizations watching people hold it up to the wrong things. Your engagement score went up four points — wonderful. But what are your people actually saying? What do they tell you on the way out the door, in the exit interview, when there’s nothing left to lose? That’s the meat. The number is just the shadow it casts.
We all got handed that awkwardly shaped wooden ruler, whether literally or metaphorically, and I don’t remember anyone handing it to me either — which is the trouble, because you can’t set down a thing you don’t know you’re holding. We grow up thinking we’re doing well when someone with more power says we are. Parents and caregivers first, because we depend on them. Then teachers, because we have to. Then managers, because the paycheck does. And somewhere in there the lesson mutates from listen to the authority into you are worth what they measure. It comes stamped differently depending on where you were raised — for MC, in France, it was stamped grades, profession, prestige — but we don’t invent these rulers. We inherit them, from whatever water we were swimming in before we were old enough to notice we were wet.
The ruler doesn’t measure the work that matters, because it was never built to. When MC and I worked together, she expressed she felt like we’d gotten “nothing done” — but what she rebuilt in those weeks didn’t show up on a deliverable list, so her nervous system filed it under nothing. You don’t have to arrive with it all resolved. If you are privileged enough to be able to pause, the work after corporate isn’t producing faster — it’s finding your rhythm and your real capacity, and learning to measure a day by what it cost you and what it gave back, not by what it earned. And by the way, I think her space looks amazing, the palette she landed with is fresh and fun and inviting. But also calm and serious, because she talks about heavy topics that deserve a shape and a space that feels like light, when so many of us have experienced the darkness.
When you monetize the thing that’s saving you
The clearest example here is MC’s, and she tells it best — go read it. The shape is what matters: after an inpatient stay, the one thing she could show up for was creative, and it held her together while the rest of her rebuilt. Then the conditioning arrived and told her to monetize it — and the moment she tried to turn the thing that was saving her into a business, it came apart. The making was never the problem. Recruiting it into proof was.
I did a version of this too, so I’m not narrating from a hill. I do some TikTok — affiliate, TikTok Shop — and I love making videos and taking pictures; always have. For a while I monetized it, and parts were genuinely great. But the fun drained out, and the tell was specific: I couldn’t just go to the beach anymore. I was filming product marketing videos on the beach instead of relaxing in one of my most happy places. The thing I loved had quietly become a thing I owed, and that sucks the fun out of it. And yet, I learned so much working with brands of all shapes and sizes. Skills are transferrable. And this is part of the trial-and-error process, especially if the path you are looking at is entrepreneurial.
This is where a simple frame earns its keep: passion, hobby, vocation, gift. Four different things, and the conditioning blurs them into a single demand — monetize all of it. But a hobby is allowed to just restore you. A passion is allowed to stay unpaid. Sometimes your gift is the worst thing to put a price tag on, because the moment it has to perform, it stops being the thing. I know that one in my body: the sport I loved most growing up became a job the day it earned me a scholarship, and something in it shifted — quietly, and for good. I’m grateful for what it gave me and I’d never trade it. And it changed. Both are true. The full inventory framework lives here.
Not everything you love needs an audience. Not every gift needs an invoice. When you feel the itch to turn the thing into a business, it’s worth asking — gently — whether that’s the calling talking, or the shame.
The rage with nowhere to go
There’s a version of leaving that isn’t a choice. MC lived it — she shared how she was pushed out after she raised concerns, then made redundant three days after the visa she’d been waiting on finally cleared. She fought it, and then she did the thing a lot of us have fantasized about: torched her professional network with one scathing post and walked away from the profession for good.
And before anyone files MC’s story under personal failing — here are the numbers, the U.S. data and the global picture both, because this is not one country’s failure. Worldwide, about 46% of employees who report misconduct say they face retaliation for it — a number NAVEX notes “remained steady” across ECI’s 2020 and 2023 Global Business Ethics Surveys. According to the EEOC, in the United States, where it’s tracked closely, retaliation is the single most frequently filed workplace charge — and has been for seventeen straight years, nearly half of everything filed in 2024. But hear me, because this matters more than any statistic: the data is the backup, not the proof. MC’s experience was true before a single survey confirmed it, and so is yours. We don’t get to wave away a person’s lived experience because we can’t find it on a chart. The numbers don’t make her story real — they just prove she was never alone in it and never broken for having lived it. Especially when the organization has the power to control the narrative and the paper trail that gets filed.
So, to be clear, because the internet is forever: I am not telling you to go scorch your employer on LinkedIn. That’s not the takeaway. But I’ve felt the exact rage MC is describing, because I’ve been the one in the room naming the thing nobody wanted named. When you’re the person flagging what’s broken, or carrying someone else’s report up the chain, the system often moves faster to remove you than to fix the thing you flagged. And the pattern is not an accident. Most workplaces are built to treat a person as a liability to manage, not a human to protect — and that isn’t a glitch, it’s the design and the pattern we hear about repeatedly, especially on Substack. Which is why none of this gets solved by landing a slightly better job or actioning the items that came out of the engagement survey. Getting free of it takes more than that. It takes a fundamental shift in how we work — and underneath that, in how we live.
And I really do not have a direct answer right now on how we do that because I am one person in a tiny town who lives on a farm surrounded by loving animals. But I am just saying, something must shift because the power dynamic is making people physically sick.
The nervous system you were trained to override
Two things happen in the conditioning, and we usually only name the first. We’re trained to override the body — push through, deliver regardless of what it costs. The second is quieter and maybe worse: we’re taught to suppress the creative, original, weird part of ourselves and be like everybody else. Color inside the lines. Pick the respectable major. Don’t make a scene. So by the time you leave, you carry both wounds at once — a nervous system trained to ignore its own limits, and a creativity that’s been told to sit down and be quiet for twenty years.
You can’t be very creative with no nervous system capacity — MC said this and that’s true. I don’t believe you have to wait until you’re fully healed to begin. Sometimes the creating is the healing. The low-stakes, no-audience exploring you do while you’re still in pieces is often exactly what rebuilds the capacity. Real creative work asks the opposite of what corporate asked: listen to the body, treat its limits as information instead of weakness, and let yourself make something badly and privately while you find your way back. The rewiring is the work.
It shows up in the smallest decisions. MC caught herself holding to a self-imposed Monday deadline no client had set — up until 3am to hit a line she’d drawn herself, a corporate deadline imported into a life that didn’t contain one. The freedom is the most radical-sounding ordinary thing: you’re allowed to publish Wednesday. Or not that week at all when you are a solopreneur or a writer. Because the beauty is in the autonomy over your schedule and going at the pace that works for your nervous system if you can do so.
I once had a person brag to me about never ever taking a sick day their entire career. I remember thinking “what the heck” and “this must be the way it’s done.” I do not fault this person at all because that belief system comes from somewhere – likely the family or cultural system. And I also believe that is a profoundly unhealthy outlook to put on human beings.
All of this adds up to a different definition of success, and we don’t talk about it enough. Careers were never ladders; they’re ecosystems of experience — messy, branching, circling back. Success stops being a stack of titles and certificates you collect to prove your worth and becomes a set of conditions: enough capacity to create, and enough freedom to do it on terms that are yours. You stop measuring days in money and time and start measuring them in energy. What did this cost me? What did it give back? By that math, the stay-at-home parent with no scholarship and no corner office might be running a wildly successful life — because success was never the trophy. It was always the conditions. And stay at home moms are so badass!
None of it holds without boundaries — the least glamorous, most essential part, the line that protects the rhythm and the first thing the conditioning trains us to drop. For people wired like us, the hardest boundary is the one around our own worth. We undercharge and over-give and feel we have to earn the right to be valued for the thing that comes most naturally. If you don’t value your own work, you can’t expect anyone else to. That one took me years, and I’m still in it.
I know that floor
I’ve been pointing you to MC’s story this whole time, but I haven’t told you why hers lands so hard for me. It’s because I’ve been on the floor she describes. Not the same floor — but close enough to recognize the ceiling.
I never went inpatient, but I did land in the hospital. What I had was a leave of absence and a body that simply stopped. For a long stretch I couldn’t get off the couch, couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t manage the ordinary vertical motion a normal day asks of you. Some days the whole accomplishment was getting out to the garden to lie in the grass and look up at the sky, because the sky was the one thing that asked nothing of me. That was the day. That was the win, and the truth is, I will always be rebuilding, and I simply cannot afford to put my wellbeing on the line – in business, or in relationships, because the cost is too big.
It was somewhere in that stretch that my therapist gave it a name: CPTSD. Complex PTSD — the kind that doesn’t come from one event but from years of them, layered and absorbed and normalized until your nervous system forgets there was ever another way to be. Hearing the name didn’t fix anything, but it did something nearly as important: it told me I wasn’t lazy, or weak, or broken in some private way that made me uniquely unfit for the world. I was a person whose body had been keeping a score I never agreed to keep. I’ve written about what that actually feels like — the day-to-day texture of it and why the isolating wasn’t the failure it looked like — if you want the longer version.
The arc MC is building — the collapse, the slow rebuild, the living from truth — is the arc a startling number of us have lived.
What you put down
So here’s the question we’ll leave you with, the one this whole conversation kept circling: what’s one rule you’re still following that nobody actually gave you? The deadline no client set. The price tag on the thing that was never meant to be sold. The belief that you’re worth exactly what you produce. Find one. Just one. Naming it is where the unlearning starts.
When I asked MC what she’d leave people with, she went straight to identity — finding out who you are apart from the messages you’ve absorbed since childhood. I won’t shrink her answer by paraphrasing it; go hear it in her words. She’s becoming. Rising like a phoenix from the ashes. That’s the whole point.
If this reached you, go find her. Subscribe to The Reframe Diaries and watch for the Overcapacity Collapse & Rebuild Arc she’s building — a map of exactly this journey, from high-masking achievement through collapse to the slow rebuild. I could have used it six years ago, when I was first diagnosed and had no map at all — just more Alphabet Soup and a pile of questions.
And if you want where this story started, our first conversation — The Cost of Having It All: When a Career Becomes a Cage — is right here.
Leave a comment and tell us: what’s the rule you’re putting down? The belief about yourself that matters the most is the one inside of you.
Author’s note: this one cost me something to write, because I lived a version of it — the floor, the system that burns you for telling the truth, the long climb back. If you’re somewhere in the middle of it, I see you, and you are not behind. You’re becoming. This piece is a gift. Take what you need from it and leave the rest. Thank you for being here on this journey.
xo Jen
