When the work changed and I had to change with it

For eleven years I introduced myself by my job title. It was a useful shorthand — at dinners, at family gatherings, on forms that asked for occupation. I was proud of the work without examining how tightly my identity had wrapped around it. Then the organisation restructured, and my role did not survive the diagram. The meeting was professional. The farewell drinks were kind. The Monday after, I had nowhere to be.

I want to be precise about the feeling, because "unemployment" is too blunt a word and "sabbatical" would be a lie. It was disorientation — the particular vertigo of waking up without a calendar that someone else built. I made lists. I updated my profile. I answered messages with cheerful progress reports I did not fully believe. At night I stared at the ceiling of my Redhill flat and wondered who I was when no one needed me at nine o'clock sharp.

The blank calendar

The first month I treated freedom like a project. I scheduled coffee meetings, online courses, gym sessions at hours previously impossible. I was productive in the way a nervous person is productive — filling space to avoid the space itself. By week five the urgency faded and something harder appeared: unstructured hours that asked nothing of me except honesty.

I walked more. I cooked lunches that took forty minutes because no meeting interrupted them. I read a novel on a Tuesday afternoon with the fan on and the city humming outside. These should have been pleasures. Often they felt like evidence — of laziness, of privilege, of falling behind people whose LinkedIn feeds showed momentum I lacked. Comparison is cruel when your own timeline has come undone.

Who am I without the title

My partner — patient throughout — said I should write down what I was good at without referencing my former employer. I resisted. The list felt embarrassing in its simplicity: listening, explaining complex things plainly, showing up on time, caring about details others skipped. None of it sounded like a career. All of it was true.

I started saying "I am between chapters" when people asked what I did. The phrase felt honest without requiring a brochure. Some nodded as if they understood. A former colleague admitted he envied my pause — he had wanted one for years but never allowed himself the gap. That conversation shifted something. Perhaps the work change was not only loss. Perhaps it was clearance — space for a different kind of professional life to grow in.

A title tells people where you sit. It does not tell you who you are when the chair is empty.

Rebuilding from the inside

I did not find a new role quickly, and I am glad I did not. The rushed search would have reproduced the old pattern — trading one identity box for another. Instead I took consulting work that paid modestly but respected my hours. I wrote more. I said no to things that looked impressive and yes to things that felt aligned, even when alignment was harder to explain at parties.

The office window in my memory — that last afternoon view — no longer represents what I lost. It represents what I was ready to outgrow: a version of myself that needed external validation the way a plant needs a stake. The stake helps at first. Eventually you have to see whether you can stand without it.

I still work. I still introduce myself with words that describe what I do. But the introduction is longer now, more careful, more mine. The work changed. I changed with it. The chapter is not finished — it rarely is — but I am no longer afraid of the blank calendar. I have learned to inhabit it.