What the hell am I doing here?

I should be in a boardroom. Giving a presentation. Somewhere that made sense for someone my age and qualifications. Not standing at a bus stop with people who could have been my kids.

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It might sound small, but but it was a feeling that kept returning, in different contexts, for three years while I was getting my degree in Psychology after spending 15+ years in marketing leadership positions.

First day of every semester, the teacher would go around the room and ask why we were there, what we hoped to get out of the course. I had my three or four sentences ready every time, worn smooth from repetition, like a broken record. This is my second degree. I have had a full career that I’m leaving for this. Yes, I’m serious about it and I know how long it will take to get there.

The hardest part of school was not even the exams or attending all the classes, it was the various situations that - mostly unintentionnaly - made me feel like I don’t belong. That I’m behind…that I’m less.

Some of it I could opt out of. For example I postponed my graduation application long enough that the decision got made for me, and I didn’t go. I didn’t want to sit in a hall full of parents my own age watching their kids cross a stage. I got my degree handed to me quietly, in an office. No ceremony. That was a choice I got to make.

This “middle part” of any process is especially hard and I don’t think is is talked about it enough and as a result many might give up on their dreams before they see results. The beginning of my journey had its own kind of fuel. Even when it was hard, there was momentum, enough energy to push through a late night of studying, enough conviction to override the doubt. That carried me for a while.

Then, somewhere around the middle three semesters, the fuel ran out and nothing had replaced it. The doubt stopped being about school specifically and became about everything. My choices, my work, my private life - all of it up for review at once.

There’s a name for this. Psychologists have long described major life adjustments as following a U-shaped curve: easy and even exciting at first, then a crisis phase marked by feeling less adjusted, lonelier, less sure of yourself, before a gradual return to feeling settled again. It was first documented in people adapting to a new country, but it holds for any real transition.

This middle part is especially difficult if what you are going doesn’t have a guranteed outcome. A degree has a finish line, you do the required work, and it’s yours. IT’s a lot, but is fixed. Building a practice, a second path, something of your own, doesn’t come with that promise. So the same collapse in the middle hits heavier, because there’s no credential waiting on the other side to prove the doubt wrong.

What got me through that middle wasn’t a tool. It was other voices.

I started listening to podcasts, people talking about major changes in their own lives, not the same situation as mine, but the same shape of disorientation. I didn’t apply most of what they suggested, I rarely do to be honest. That wasn’t really the point. The point was hearing someone else describe standing at their own version of my bus stop and not feeling like an alien.

Because nobody around me was in it with me and that is tough. At school, everyone was decades younger. In the rest of my life, people were either settled into careers they’d built long ago, or unhappy in theirs but not doing anything about it yet. Naming the same “this isn’t it for me” feeling I had, without ever starting. Nobody in my daily life was actually mid-build, the way I was. That absence made the mental weight of the middle heavier than the middle itself.

Psychologists have long treated belonging as a basic human motivation, as fundamental as food or safety and one of the more useful findings in that research is that when a source of belonging isn’t available close to you, people find substitutes elsewhere. Mine came through headphones, from strangers who’d never meet me and didn’t know I existed.

It worked, as far as it went. But it was one-directional. Recorded after the fact, by people who’d already made it through and were describing it in hindsight. There was no way to respond, no way to say I’m in the middle of this right now as well.

That’s the part I keep thinking about.

What if that same thing, people who understand the shape of this because they’re in it, not because they survived it years ago existed live. Not a recording. A room.

I think the middle gets more livable once you stop being the only one in the room who’s confused.:)

I’m working on a version of that room right now. More on it soon.

See you soon,

Emese

She knew I’d been working. She knew there was more to the story. And I could tell she meant the question, she wasn’t just making conversation.

I opened my mouth to answer, and what came out was almost nothing.

“I just finished school,” I said.

That was it. Underwhelming. Nowhere close to what’s actually true: the psychodrama training, the coaching practice, the Substack, the job I’m still keeping while all of this is being built. I wasn’t being evasive. I just wasn’t ready to give her the real answer, because the real answer doesn’t have a clean shape yet. I haven’t figured out how to say all of it in one line that still makes sense.

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I’ve been sitting with that ever since.

I recently heard the term “skill stacking” on the Anatomy of a Dream podcast - the idea that a career full of seemingly random turns often isn’t random at all. Looked at it backwards, after some kind of success, those turns tend to reveal the exact combination of skills that was need to achive that kind of result.

I think that’s what’s happening to me right now.

Why this even matters

When you have a corporate title, it does work before you open your mouth. It signals your industry, your seniority, your expertise, roughly what your day looks like and how much you make. The company name tells people what kind of environment you operate in. This is a lot of information communicated about you with you need your action.

I know the current cretor culture pushes against this. Everyone wants to detach from corporate lingo, build something individual, resist being defined by a title. I agree we’re not just our title. But conflating that with “I don’t need to be known for anything specific” is a mistake. A title and an identity are doing two different jobs. Losing the title doesn’t mean you don’t still need the other thing it was doing, that is helping people place you.

You need to be known for one thing. Not because you’re only one thing - you’re not, you’re multifaceted, you can’t be boxed in - but because if people can’t find a place in their mind for you, they won’t remember you at all. That’s not a limitation. It’s just how memory and recognition work, personally and professionally.

“I’m multi-passionate, I don’t want to be boxed in” is often a cop-out in my opinion. It skips the actual work of deciding what you want to be known for in this season of your life. Not forever, just for now. It’s a lot of work to figure that out and often needs help from outside be it a coach a content strategyst whatever.

Looking back, sure I could have just told my friend: it’s messy, I have no idea what I’m doing right now. That was an option too and I think she would have understood. It just didn’t occur to me until later. You know one of those “I should have …” realizations after the fact.

I did want to update her on my life, not just get through the moment. If I can’t be clear on what I’m doing, I can’t expect her to walk away with any clarity either. And doing the work of getting clear, not on a permanent identity, just on where the focus is for this season, saves a huge amount of mental energy. Not just in conversations like that one, but in how you show up on Substack, on LinkedIn, anywhere you’re representing yourself.

There’s another cost to this.

If you can’t say clearly who you are and what you stand for, the people around you can’t help you either. Not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know how.

Say a friend mentions they know someone looking for a coach. If you’ve never been able to say out loud, clearly, “I coach women through career transitions,” your name doesn’t come to mind. Not because they forgot you exist, but because there was never a clean association to retrieve. You didn’t give them anywhere to file you.

Being known for one thing isn’t about shrinking yourself. It’s what lets the people who already want to help you actually do it: refer you, think of you, connect you to something. Instead of staying willing but unable, because they don’t have anything to point to.

That’s the actual point of doing this work. Now here’s one way to start.

How to find the one thing

1. List everything. Every role, skill, credential, hour of unpaid practice. The whole messy inventory, no filtering.

2. Strip each one to its function, not its label. Not “psychodrama director” in my case, but what that work actually does. Titles hide function; this step puts it back in view.

3. Look for the repeat. Once the labels are gone, the same function usually shows up more than once, across things that looked unrelated. That repeat is usually the real thread.

4. Pick one. Not forever. For this season. The repeat you found is where you start, while everything else keeps building.

5. Test it out loud, more than once. Say it to a real person. Some discomfort at first is normal, that’s unfamiliarity, not proof it’s wrong. The question is whether it settles the more you say it, or never fits no matter how many times you try it on.

6. Check it against what your circle already trusts you for. Ask people who already come to you for something. Does the line match that, or does it come out of nowhere? If it doesn’t match, that’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s worth understanding why.

One more thing worth building

Now you have a one-liner that mostly works. But who you’re speaking to still matters. You’d answer “what do you do” differently to a complete stranger than to a close friend you want to be fully honest with, and differently again to a potential client or partner where credibility needs to be front and center.

My advice: build three versions ahead of time, so they’re already banked when you need them.

One for the stranger: quick, clean, closes the loop without inviting more than you want to give.

One for the honest moment : with someone you trust, where the mess is allowed to show, because that’s what real connection is built on.

One for credibility: where your training, your experience, your actual expertise needs to be visible, because the moment calls for it.

Having these ready means you’re not scrambling for words in the moment, translating your whole life on the spot, every single time. That’s what actually saves the energy, not pretending you have one simple answer, but knowing which true answer to reach for, depending on who’s in front of you. Again this saves you energy and mental capacity. A scarce resourse in midlife. Well at any “life” for that matter.

Before you go

If you try this : the list, the stripping, the repeat, the one-liner, I’d genuinely like to know what you come up with. Not a polished version. Just whatever comes up when you actually sit down and do it. The comments are open, and I’ll read every one.

Getting clear on the one thing thet describes you for now solves one problem. It doesn’t explain why you’re doing this, or what it’s costing you to build it while still holding everything else.

That’s the next part of this. Subscribe for more clarity in a messy midlife transition.

Bye for now,

Emese

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Therapy on the go

Choosing to stay, for now

A client of mine just came back from a sabbatical, six months away from her high-profile job. When we talked, she told me she’s going back to work, strategically, to collect a few more paychecks while she figures out what she actually wants to do next. Around the same time, a family member of mine described spending the next year traveling, using the ti…

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21 days ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Emese Tar

Today, we go further and explore what does staying and building alongside your 9-to-5 actually entail, psychologically? Why is it so difficult? And some practical guidance, from my own experience.

Multiple roles

One of the difficulties of building something alongside a career be it school, a business, a publication, is that you need to switch between roles constantly.

In my case: wake up, tell my team what they needed that day, rush to school to be evaluated on papers or give a presentation. Noon, argue with a subcontractor. Back to school. Night, homework. Costantly swithiching between, student, manager, then back to student again.

Your side gig could be different it might be building a business while still in a 9-5, boss here, employee there. Or a creator writting about their intimate thoughts at night while hiding all the feelings and emotions at a corporate setting during the day. Same switching, different rooms.

This constant frame-switching is exhausting and stressful on its own. It takes energy, mental capacity, flexibility and these very things decrease under stress creating a cycle where perfomance in degraded and rest is very hard.

Here’s is my “revolutionary thought” : you only have 100% no matter how hard you try or how good you are. If you’re doing school, or a business, alongside your job, you cannot give 100% to both. You can do a reasonably good job at both. But you cannot excel at both.

What actually separates success from failure

Here’s the thesis I keep coming back to: what separates failure from success in a midlife transition isn’t skill or knowledge. You already have the skills. You’re not a beginner even if you are starting as one on a new field.
You know how to acquire information, structure it, problem-solve, deal with people etc. Information is abundant and mostly accessible. What separates failure from success is not what you need to learn but how much energy, capacity, and focus you can actually give it.

And that’s hard enough with two roles, in reality you have many more that needs your attention: friendships, being a parent, a partner, whatever else already has a claim on you.

We also cannot get past the fact thet in midlife, one of those usually come first. So your new project only gets what’s left over.

The chronic calibration

Here’s what I had to realize: guilt is one thing - we talked about that in the first newsletter, the guilt of not being able to give 100% to either priority. Besides that guilt there is the stress of constantly calibrating where you stand in each role.

Since you can’t be perfect everywhere but still need to get things done and progress, so you’re always calibrating. Doing the math constantly when you try squsing 30 hours of tasks into 24. What can slide? What’s essential? Whether this deadline can move. Who’s sensitive about that, and who isn’t.

That constant checking, whether you’re in danger of failing (meaning not performing well) anywhere, is a textbook stress response. Low and chronic, not a crisis you can point to. It feels more like juggling plates on sticks. Throw one up, hope to catch the next while another’s still in the air. Try doing that for years. Oh, I know you have….

The frustrating part you can’t plan for this in advance. There’s that old advice: fail to plan, plan to fail. Try doing a million things at once with a strict plan. It doesn’t work. This kind of life needs a flexible plan. Deadlines, you plan for. Day to day, a week ahead if lucky.

The proof

I consider myself a high achiever. For me it means if I don’t do a good job, I feel really bad. But I failed more than once at school.

What separated a 5 (an A+) from a fail wasn’t knowledge. If I had time to study, I got a 5. Energy in, good result. No energy, postpone or fail. Between a fail and a 5, I rarely got anything else.

Friends doing school in midlife told me the same thing. They only failed when they ran out of energy because work interfered, family interfered.

Same mechanism, different work: the client call you walked into underprepared, the launch that fell flat because you were pulled in ten directions, the piece you published half-finished, the weeks you went quiet because life ate the hours meant for creating.

Here’s what I need you to hear, if any of this is familiar: when you don’t do a good enough job because the energy or focus wasn’t there that week, that’s not a judgment on your character. Not an evaluation of your skill or capability. It’s an evaluation of one thing: how much that was prioritized in your life at that time, and how much energy you had left to give it. Not who you are. Just where your energy went that week.

So how do you actually decide what slides

Start from the non-negotiables. A holiday planned months ago, everyone excited? That is fixed, don’t touch it. A vague someday-holiday, that one flexes around deadlines.

You decide what’s non-negotiable use your best judgement. A big presentation you need to be fully prepared for that’s a non-negotiable. If an exam or other side-gig obligation clashes, that one moves.

My rule: work over school, family over both. Not rigid though. If meeting I was only invited to “just in case,” clashing with school, I’d negotiate. Ask to miss it, read the transcript, catch up after. Sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t.

Same logic for a business: a client deliverable with a real deadline is non-negotiable. Content you meant to publish that week probably isn’t. It can slide a few days without real cost.

Pinpoint the three to five things that genuinely need your full attention that week or month. Everything else, let it flex. Use what’s left to refill your energy and end your days.

This mechanism I just described where energy and focus are the real scarce resource, not skill, has to be seen clearly before any life-transition plan is created.
Not because seeing it fixes the overload, but because most plans fail by ignoring it.

While seeing it changes more than the plan. It changes how you carry the guilt. “Why can’t I do this better” becomes “this is what I’m actually managing.” That shift changes the conversations you have with the people pulling on your different roles too because now you can name the real constraint, instead of apologizing for one that doesn’t exist.

You’re still going to run out of hours some weeks. But you’ll know why and therefore manage it.

If this is the life you’re running right now, I’d like to know which part costs you the most.

Next in this series: what happens once the capacity is finally there, the doing has started...Subscribe now, not to miss it!✅

Three different strategies for the same pressing problem: knowing what you’ve been doing isn’t working anymore, and having only a vague or no idea what comes next.

Most of what we read about change assumes there are only two ways through this. You either find a way to feel fulfilled where you are, or you leave. Hollywood loves the leaving stories : the resignation letter, the plane ticket, the blank page. They’re satisfying to watch or read because a decision that finally gets made feels good.

“Finally, I did something. “

Handing in your notice can instantly feel like a new chapter has begun. The old problems locked in the past, soleved. A blank slate that is energizing finnaly something real…

But a decision like that has its own hangover if it isn’t made strategically.

Not because leaving is wrong.

Because sometimes the consequences of a sudden decision bring more stress than the job you were trying to escape.

There’s a third option nobody tells stories about: staying, on purpose, while you build something else.

This isn’t settling. Settling is giving up, deciding this is as good as it gets and stop wanting better. And it isn’t a failure of nerve either.

It’s closer to risk management than fear. You’re not stuck. You’re restructuring.

What choosing to stay means

A few years ago I was leading teams in marketing, having trained as an economist, when I decided to go back to school to become a therapist. I didn’t leave my job to do it. I stayed, and built the second thing inside the first.

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Some mornings looked like this: clearing my inbox before class so my team knew what to do for the day, sitting through a lecture, leaving early to find a quiet corner of the university for a work call, grabbing a few bites before the next class, getting notifications that emails were piling up mid-lecture, stepping out more than once to make a quick call, then going home to another meeting before starting on schoolwork at night. That was a typical weekday.

What made it workable wasn’t willpower. It was a couple of ground rules, and it’s one I’d hand to anyone else standing where I was.

The ground rules

I told my workplace from the day I applied. Anything that requires a fixed schedule (classes, a structured program, fixed times) needs your employer to know, and to actually be okay with it. That’s different from something like a side project that doesn’t interfere with your working hours at all; that one doesn’t need approval in the same way. But even then, I’d still lean toward openness. Hiding it and worrying about being found out is its own kind of exhausting, on top of everything else you’re already carrying.

I worked flexible hours, which helped. If I had a fixed class, I blocked it out and made up the time earlier or later in the day. And when something couldn’t be moved (a meeting that had to happen, a deadline that had to land) work came first. Always. That was the rule, and it’s the part people skip when they imagine this kind of stretch: it only holds together if you know, clearly, what can wait and what can’t.

I have to be honest, though. Quite often I felt like I couldn’t do both at the same time. I felt like I couldn’t be a professional leader and a student in the same body. Part of it was physical, moving between roles from one hour to the next in a big city. But the harder part was the role-switching itself. At eight in the morning I was leading a team. At ten I was a student asking questions about Freud and Jung. At eleven I was back to arguing with a subcontractor about a delivery. At two, someone was telling me how my essay had performed. At night, I was figuring out linear regression for my statistics homework. And that was only two of my roles. I was also a wife, a friend, a daughter, the World for my two dogs and a million other things asking for attention in the same day.

For me this system worked, but it didn’t make any of that easier.

There’s a specific guilt that comes with this kind of stretch. Not the guilt of doing something wrong. It is the sense that you’re not giving enough anywhere.

The guilt

You are not enough to your team, not enough to your studies, not enough to the people waiting for you at home. You’re trying to do a million things at once, and even when you’re doing most of them reasonably well, it can still feel like you’re not enough at any of them. That has its own toll on your self image and mental health, separate from the exhaustion.

None of this gets a story. Nobody makes a movie about someone who stayed at their job and built their next chapter quietly on the side, grinding one blocked-out hour at a time. There’s no blank-slate feeling in it, no big scene. It just looks like a full calendar and a person who’s giving it all and still not thinking it is enough.

My point is that staying like this isn’t the smaller choice. It’s the version of courage that stayes hidden. The one that asks you to hold two things at once, tell the truth about what you’re doing, and keep showing up fully at a job you already know you’re outgrowing. That takes its own kind of nerve. It is not easy.

Why this is the harder path

There’s a real reason the sudden decision feels so good. Psychologists call it the need for closure. It is a well-documented pull toward a firm answer over an open question, because uncertainty itself is uncomfortable to carry.

Under stress, we’re also wired to simplify.

Research on decision-making shows that when people are anxious, they tend to gather less information and move faster toward any resolution, not necessarily the right one. Quitting on the spot gives you closure instantly. Staying, with the plan still forming, gives you none of that relief. You’re choosing to keep living inside the open question, on purpose, which is a harder thing to do than it sounds. It’s not a flaw in you that it feels harder. It’s your brain doing exactly what brains do with ambiguity.

If you’re in the middle of this right now: staying on purpose, building something quietly on the side, this is for you. Not everyone’s story looks like a resignation letter. Some of them look like a blocked-out hour on a Tuesday morning, and that counts too.
This is part of a series about staying on the job on purpose, without pretending it’s easy. If this described something real for you, the rest of it will too. Subscribe to get the next part.

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Then I noticed what was underneath it.

“These situations always play out the same way.”
”I’m never taken seriously.”
”This never changes.”
”Everyone is entitled to their opinions, nobody cares about the facts.”

None of that was actually true. I was overgeneralizing. Taking one piece of evidence (or a set of it if it is particuralry bad week) under stress and making it into a final verdict.

I thought it might resonate with some of you so instead of the burnout piece I’m writting about that.

The pattern

In cognitive behavioral therapy, overgeneralization means taking a single event, or a short run of difficulty, and treating it as proof of something true and permanent. One hard meeting becomes nobody respects me here. One difficult week becomes I can’t do this. The distortion isn’t in noticing it. It’s in letting that one stretch testify on behalf of the whole story, forever, no further evidence required.

The giveaway is usually in the words. Always. Never. Everyone. Nobody. Every time. None of those words are describing what happened. They’re describing how depleted the person saying them is.

Why the brain does this

Overgeneralization isn’t a flaw in reasoning. It’s a shortcut, and shortcuts exist because they’re useful, efficient. Under real threat, there isn’t time to gather a representative sample before deciding what to do. One bad experience gets stored as a rule: avoid that, danger there. It’s fast, it costs little, and, that speed can in some situations keep people alive. This looks like a lion, I’d better run.

The same shortcut runs during ordinary stress, using the same mechanics. One hard conversation gets stored as a rule about all conversations. One difficult week gets set as a rule about the whole undertaking. The brain isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing the job it was built to do: turn a small amount of information into a fast, confident answer, so there’s less to sit with.

The shortcut itself isn’t the issue. It has its place.

The issue is reach, when a rule meant for one narrow situation gets applied to every week, every meeting, every moment of doubt. My mid-week meltdown needed sleep, some distance and a plan for the specific situation that needed handling.

It didn’t need a verdict on the rest of the year.

Why it feels like relief

We also do it beacuse overgeneralization feels good. It feels like clarity, like something has finally been uncovered and can be kept: the truth about a person, a situation, or myself. A specific read of one bad week doesn’t offer that same relief, because it stays open. It keeps asking for more information, keeps leaving room for things to look different next time. A verdict closes the file, and that closure is what feels good.

It’s the same mechanism behind prejudice and stereotyping: one instance standing in for a whole category, treated as fact instead of a single data point. And it’s rarely actionable. I can’t do this and everyone always does this to me don’t point anywhere. There’s no next step attached to a verdict that broad. A specific read, uncomfortable as it is to sit with, at least leaves something to do.

Separating the fact from the interpretation

The fact: this week was hard, I was stretched thin, attacked and I didn’t have much left over for proper emotional regulation and planning.

The interpretation: therefore the whole situation is hopeless, or I’m the wrong person for the job.

The first is data. The second is a story an exhausted mind writes. A verdict has an ending. A hard week that’s just a hard week doesn’t, and that’s the harder thing to tolerate.

Why specificity matters more right now

In a settled life, generalized thinking tends to cost less. There's usually enough evidence banked to absorb a bad week without much damage. Career change tends to remove that cushion. A new identity is still collecting its evidence, one interaction, one class, one client, one conversation at a time, without the same reserve behind it yet. Broad language, always, never, I can't, this doesn't work, can turn a single data point into the whole trial. It closes a question that specific language would have kept open.

Specific language locates the problem where it actually happened, instead of spreading it across everything. One conversation going badly is something with an edge to it: a thing to look at, prepare differently for, or let go of. This always happens to me has no edge. There’s nothing to do with a sentence like that except believe it, or fight it while already exhausted.

Building something new runs on evidence gathered slowly, most of it unremarkable. Overgeneralization interrupts that by letting one hard data point overwrite months of quieter ones. Staying specific is what keeps the evidence intact long enough to actually become what it’s building toward.

A way to catch it in real time

Notice the words doing the generalizing: always, never, everyone, nobody, the whole thing. Then do the opposite.
Specificity is the antidote to overgeneralization.
Swap always for sometimes.
Swap everyone for some people, or one person, named.
Swap never for not this time.
What exactly happened?
What’s still true once that language is set aside?

For me, this week, what was left after this excersise: one conversation went badly, and I felt dismissed in it. Not this always happens, and I’m never taken seriously. Not I can’t do this anymore.

The thing being built doesn’t need every week to go well to be real. It only needs the hard weeks to be read correctly, as hard weeks, not as verdicts on the whole story.

That's the practice: catching the verdict while it’s happening and before it hardens into something permanent.

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Further down my own timeline, I thought I should have been a CEO by now, somewhere, like the friends around me who were already running companies. Instead I was back in a classroom I’d left twenty years earlier, being told by some of my teachers, without them saying it outright, that being there could only mean one thing: failure.

That was the first real hardship. Not the coursework. The feeling that I had gone backward.

Is it too late?

I don’t think it was one exact moment for me. It was more of a continuous feeling, for years and years and years. Back when I was getting my economics training, I already thought : this isn’t what I want to do. I knew it back then. But I had the reasoning that I’d already put in so many years studying economics, so where would I even go instead? Then, once I was actually in the career, I had another version of the same explanation: I’d already put in so many years into this career, why would I change now?

Too late is the default setting. It’s not reserved for career changes at forty. It’s too late to have kids, too late to switch majors, too late to admit you’ve invested years into the “wrong thing”. At eighteen, a single year invested in the wrong degree feels like an enormous sunk cost. At forty, looking back, that same year is nothing. But you don’t get to borrow that perspective while you’re still living inside the decision.

The truth is simpler and less comfortable: you stay in the “too late phase” for exactly as long as the pain of staying on the same course is smaller than the pain of switching over. The moment that balance tips is the moment things move. Not before.

And honestly, the pattern kept repeating long before I ever named it. Economics was the sensible next step after my first degree. I knew, even then, it wasn’t right, but it was logical, so I did it. A job in marketing came next, same story, another logical use of what I’d already trained in. I remember my first internship, at a market research firm, and knowing almost instantly that this wasn’t it either. After that I ended up at a company instead (work I actually believed in) and I stayed there for close to a decade. Long enough that working for a cause stopped being a job and slowly became who I was. Identities like that are not easy to shake.

Why it takes some people longer than others

Not everyone sits with this for twenty years. Some people decide fast, without weighing every angle. Some are pushed harder by circumstance. And some never face the question at all . They just don’t let themselves get close enough to it.

It is easy to pretend for a very long time that things are okay. I could have stayed. I was already in leadership roles. I could have moved to another NGO, built another team, kept sailing, posted the success stories on LinkedIn. I could have phrased that story convincingly. It just wasn’t in my heart. It wasn’t what gave me a reason to want to wake up on a Monday.

We all have different thresholds. And most of the time, this isn’t something we say out loud, which means it’s hard to even admit to ourselves. If you’d asked twenty-year-old me what I actually wanted, I might have still remembered. By twenty-five, I was already down the path, and it was only ever running quietly in the back of my mind.

This isn’t anyone’s fault. Nobody did anything wrong.

It’s just life. You make one decision, you evaluate, you make another, you evaluate again. If you never stop to actually check in on those decisions, you can stay on the wrong path for decades without ever deciding to.

What finally moved me

Pushing through that classroom feeling didn’t come from nowhere. I think I drew the strength for it from the same two decades I’d spent ignoring myself. Once I finally decided to go back and finish the degree, I wanted to finish it as fast as possible , not stretch it over five years, but get through it and get moving toward the next step. Having that single, narrow, concrete goal made the noise easier to ignore. Other people’s opinions, their guesses about what I was doing with my life - that was just noise. I didn’t have a single doubt about the goal itself, and that certainty is what made the noise easier to walk past.

But the decision itself didn’t arrive as one clean moment either. It came from a few things landing close together. I’d had a job offer abroad that I really wanted, and for reasons that don’t matter here, I couldn’t take it. That disappointment left me needing a real reason to stay where I was. Needing to do something that was actually for myself. Around the same time, a close friend, a clinical psychologist who’d known me since I was fourteen, told me plainly that we need to pursue our dreams when we still have them. And during the first module of my psychodrama training, one of my trainers told me he thought my presence, the way I look at things, could be healing to others. That one stayed with me.

None of those three things were my own certainty arriving out of thin air. They were things landing on ground I’d already quietly prepared, over twenty years of noticing and ignoring. I had practice :)

What starting again actually costs

Being a beginner again is not comfortable, no matter how ready you are underneath it. You are humbled by things you don’t know yet, in rooms with people who know more than you and are younger than you, and you have to be okay with that.

But here’s what I’d add: I may not be as knowledgeable as someone my age who’s held a psychology PhD for twenty years. I’ve had decades of life experience instead, and I weave that directly into how I practice now. Even with identical training, I wouldn’t be the same therapist at twenty-three that I am today. I’ve lived more of what I’m sitting across from and that is valuable. Being a beginner this time around isn’t really starting from zero.

One thing I won’t pretend about

Making a decision like this is a privilege, and I want to say that plainly, because I don’t want this piece to drift into something detached from how most women actually live. In my case, three practical things had to be true before any of the psychological readiness mattered: I needed a job that allowed the schedule attend classes, I needed the money, because this was genuinely expensive, and I needed a personal life with enough room in it to actually study. These aren’t small details. If you don’t have time, money, or bandwidth in place, that has to be dealt with honestly, not talked around.

Maybe for you it isn’t a psychology degree. It’s the book you’ve started twice and abandoned, or the YouTube channel you have started in your head a million times. A webshop you wanted to launch. Whatever it is for you, it’s probably been running quietly in the back of your mind for longer than you’d admit.

So here’s what I actually want you to take from this, if you recognize any of it in yourself: don’t ignore the nudge. If there’s something you’ve wanted for years, to write, to teach, to launch, to build don’t pretend it isn’t there. But don’t rush it into a decision either. Any real shift needs planning, and an honest, outside-eye look at how it fits into your actual life: the money, the family, the logistics.

If you start thinking seriously about how to solve the problem, you’ll find real answers. If you keep ignoring that there’s a problem at all, you never will.

It’s not glamorous. I know that. But it’s real, and honestly, that’s more useful.

At the same time, I missed my family. And when the relationship that took me there in the first place ended and the company I was working for started having financial troubles, I was hurt and I needed to feel safe. So I decided to move back to Budapest “for a while” to figure out life.

After that, I felt stuck – mainly professionally. I could not find my way back to a really rewarding career path. I tried various positions, all great and seemingly rewarding from the outside, but none of them felt like “this is me, this is what I want.” At one point I even got certified as a pastry chef. :)

I was looking for ways to find my way back to Dubai, but I don’t think I fully admitted it, even to myself. So I said I was stuck. That was the word I had for whatever I was feeling.

I wasn’t stuck.
I was grieving a life I didn’t get to live.

When “stuck” is actually grief

We have these unlived lives – paths that were possible, sometimes very concrete, that we never got to fully play out because life required us to make decisions that made them impossible.

In my case, one of those unlived lives was the version where I stayed in Dubai, built a career there, had a family and saw where that expat life would lead if I hadn’t had to pull the plug. Another unlived life came later.

About five years ago, I finally found a job advert there exactly in my very specialised area. I went through an extensive hiring process and got selected. By that time I was married and just before we started planning the move, my husband was diagnosed with a serious illness.

We decided to stay where he could get surgery and the treatment he needed. Turning down that job offer was the only choice that made sense.

Those months were emotionally turbulent and I was more focused on my husband’s health than on my career, of course. But once we were out of the woods, looking back, that event was the last drop in the bucket. It pushed me back to school to get my training as a psychologist. I felt like I needed to do something for myself and stop denying what I really wanted.

So the Dubai career and the turned‑down job weren’t just “missed opportunities.” They were lives I had to let go of. For a long time, I called it being stuck. What I was actually doing was grieving.

The psychology behind the “unlived life”

You can grieve lives you never lived.

Psychologists sometimes call this “the grief of the unlived life” or “counterfactual grief”: mourning the paths not taken and the selves you never became, often because circumstances, responsibilities, or health made them impossible.

This kind of grief shows up frequently in mid‑career and mid‑life, around big transitions and health scares, and when you realise your life has been organised around other people’s expectations more than your own. It is not grief for a person who died. It is grief for versions of yourself, futures you imagined, and identities you wore for a while and had to take off.

Career research and clinical work both point to this: leaving or reshaping a long‑term career or life direction can trigger grief tied to identity, purpose, and self‑worth. You feel like a part of your life story ended without a proper goodbye. Sometimes it feels like a part of you died with it.

That’s what those years felt like for me: not just confusion, but the quiet loss of a version of myself I had already started to imagine. It was painful and I it took me years to understand what was really going on.

If you don’t have a word for this, it’s easy to call it “stuck” or “unmotivated” and turn it into a character problem.

How grief for an unlived life tends to move

The classic grief model – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – was developed for loss through death. It doesn’t always fit neatly, but you can see echoes of it in career and life‑path grief too.

Denial in this context can sound like “It wasn’t that important” or “I can always go back later,” even when you know the window has closed. Anger can turn into “Why did I waste years here?” or “Why did this health crisis have to happen now?” Bargaining might show up as “One more year in this job,” “One more application,” “Maybe if I just get promoted…”, “I will move once this and that happens…”

For many people the most recognisable stage is the flatness of depression: work doesn’t matter anymore, nothing fits, you feel “too late” and “too tired” to change. Acceptance is quieter: “This chapter is over. What’s next?” Not triumphant, but honest.

You may move back and forth between these. There is no neat order. But recognising that what you’re feeling follows a grief pattern – not a failure pattern – can take some pressure off.

Why we call grief “stuck”

Saying “I’m stuck” is simpler than saying, “I don’t know who I am if I’m not the person who moves abroad for work,” or “I don’t know who I am if I’m not on this specialised track.” It is easier than saying,

“I’m mourning a life I chose not to live.”

It doesn’t even come to mind that we’re grieving a life that never fully happened. It can sound self‑indulgent or dramatic. So we downgrade it to “stuckness,” “burnout,” “lack of motivation.”

If you mislabel grief as laziness, you treat it wrong. You try productivity tricks when what you actually need is mourning then some clarity. You push yourself to “move on” when your psyche is trying to say goodbye.

You attack yourself instead of giving yourself the space to feel the loss of who you could have been in those other lives.

What to do with an unlived life

This is not a five‑step healing plan - sorry :S

But there are a few things you can do that are more honest than telling yourself you’re just stuck.

You can start very simply by calling your experience grief, not failure. “I’m grieving the life I didn’t live.” “I’m grieving the career I turned down.” “I’m grieving the version of me who stayed on that track.” Naming it as grief acknowledges that something real was lost, even if it was a possibility rather than a finished story.

Then you can identify what you are actually mourning. Not just the job title, but the emotional content. What did that life represent for you – freedom, safety, status, adventure, belonging? What did you imagine that version of you would feel like in daily life? When you look closely, you may realise that you are mourning qualities and feelings – being respected, feeling alive and inspired, being challenged – not only roles.

That matters, because some of those qualities can be brought into your current life in different forms.

You can also notice what this unlived life has already given you. The life you didn’t live still shaped you. You don’t have to romanticise it, but you can ask, “What did this path teach me, even though I didn’t stay on it?” Work on mid‑life mourning and reinvention suggests that acknowledging the gifts of a lost path can support healthier reinvention.

And you can allow sadness without turning it into a verdict. You are allowed to feel sad about what you didn’t get to live without deciding that your current life is meaningless or over. In clinical settings, people who let themselves grieve lost roles and futures often adapt better than those who try to skip mourning and jump straight into reinvention. You don’t have to share this grief with everyone. You can start with yourself, maybe with one person who understands what you gave up.

If you’re mid‑career, reading this between emails or on a lunch break, it may be worth asking whether the heaviness you feel around work is really boredom, or whether part of you is mourning a path you didn’t take.

Drawing motivation from what you didn’t live

An unlived life can be dead weight. Or it can become fuel.

For me, the jobs I didn’t take and the moves I didn’t make pushed me to a point where I could no longer deny what I wanted. That’s when I went back to school and trained as a psychologist. I didn’t “get back” Dubai then - since things have changed but that is a story for another day. I didn’t get that exact specialised job. But I did get a clearer sense that I was done pretending my career was only about external paths and titles.

If you feel stuck now – professionally, geographically, personally – it might be worth asking: am I actually stuck, or am I still grieving a life I didn’t get to live and not allowing that grief to have its place?

You may not be stuck.
You may be grieving.

And grief can be allowed, and even welcomed, as part of how you find the next version of your life that is really yours.

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She has decades of experience and a PhD. She knows exactly where the gaps are. She shared that she has a couple of people in mind she could pitch her idea to, but she is not sure how to approach them and will probably wait to contact them until the autumn. It is summer, after all, so we should all rest.

Lately I keep hearing versions of this from people who are building something of their own – a practice, a side business, a Substack, a different kind of life.

The minute she said it out loud and saw my face peeking through the bright orange Aperol Spritz, she smiled and realised she was just postponing, making up – although valid – excuses for not taking action. The real reason was not that she didn’t have the energy to write a couple of emails pitching her idea. She was waiting for permission, for validation that she is excellent in her field. A PhD did not do that. What could?

This is the very same reason I haven’t told her or any of my friends and relatives that I am writing on Substack. When I open the app and hover over the “share” button to post something to my personal accounts, I still close it. Who am I to pose as some kind of expert?

We all do that.

The quiet ways we wait for permission

We rarely say, “I’m waiting for permission.”
We are more sophisticated than that.

We say we’re thinking it through.
We say we’re waiting for the right moment.
We say we’re being responsible.

It looks reasonable and it often sounds like this:

Once things calm down at work, then I’ll…
If this next post does well, then I’ll…
When I feel more ready, more confident, more qualified, then I’ll…

Until then, we sit in the not yet. We look for signs. We read meaning into small things that were never designed to carry that much weight.

From a psychological perspective, it makes sense. Many of us were raised in environments where approval meant safety and belonging. Our self‑esteem learned to track other people’s reactions like a weather report.

The world you are trying to build in now - a practice, a Substack, a different kind of life - doesn’t send out official approval letters. There is no professor signing your change of direction. No supervisor giving you a grade for “life choices, A minus.”

So you wait for something that doesn’t exist.
Waiting for permission becomes a socially acceptable way of avoiding the risk of being seen.

And as long as you are waiting, you can tell yourself it is not that you are avoiding change. You are just being careful.

How to move without a green light

I am not going to tell you to “just do it.”
If it were that simple, you would have done it already.

What you can do is make the step smaller and bring the decision closer to yourself.

Name the thing you are actually postponing

Not the story around it. The thing itself.

- Emailing those two people about your idea.

- Telling one friend you are writing on Substack.

- Putting a price on a session and saying it out loud.

Write it down in one plain sentence. No “when life is less busy,” no “once I’ve researched more.”

Very often, once it is on paper, you see that the action is small. The storm is in your head.

Plan what you will do if it goes badly

Part of why we wait is that we treat a negative reaction as catastrophic. So we wait until we can somehow guarantee that everyone will be pleased.

You can lower the stakes by deciding in advance:

- If they ignore the email, I’ll follow up once, then let it go.

- If they say no, I’ll allow myself to feel disappointed, and I ask one curious question, then move on.

- If someone makes a mean comment, I’ll share it with one person who is on my side, then I decide if there is anything useful in it.

You do not need a perfect plan. Just enough that your nervous system knows: if this goes badly, I still know what to do.

Give yourself a deadline for waiting

Waiting can go on forever if it has no end point.

You can try something simple:

If I still want this in three months, I will take one step, even if no one has given me permission by then.

You are not forcing yourself into a huge leap. You are just saying: I will not let “wait and see” quietly stretch into years.

If you are reading this on a break, thinking about your own “after summer” plan, consider this your sign: no one is coming to hand you a permission slip.

This is not about pretending you do not care what anyone thinks. You do. I do.

It is about noticing where you have handed all the power to people who have no idea their opinion is holding your life in place, and slowly taking some of that power back. One email. One conversation. One article at a time.

You do not need permission to change your life.
You might just need one clear, honest, self‑given “yes” to start.

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Now I’m here again, writing, trying to understand what happened. I’m using my training as a psychologist to make sense of it, and I’d like to offer that to anyone who recognises themselves in this pattern too.

For a long time, that gap felt like a verdict. A little shameful.
Maybe I was lazy.
Maybe I wasn’t serious enough.
Maybe I just wasn’t any good.
Yes, maybe….

But when I look at it now, I see something else: I was using the mindset I was trained in.
And in that mindset, my choice was logical.

The mindset of effort = reward

There is something comfortable about courses, trainings, university. The path is laid out. You show up, do the assignments, sit the exams. At the end you get a degree. Your effort and your reward are clearly linked. You always know what the next step is.

Our brains like that.
Psychology has a whole language for this: “intolerance of uncertainty” is the tendency to feel very threatened when you don’t know what will happen. It’s closely tied to anxiety and worry. Feels familiar?

Structured systems reduce uncertainty. You know the deadlines, you know the grading rules, you know how to “win.” If, like me, you’ve spent years in those systems, you get good at one thing: reducing uncertainty as fast as possible.

It works. You pass exams. You collect degrees. You get a bonus.
That mindset is not wrong. It’s just built for a specific kind of world.

Then you step into the fog

Building something of your own is a different world.

A newsletter, a private practice, a business, a Substack - it all lives in a much foggier landscape:

1. There is no fixed curriculum or signed off annual plan.

2. No one can promise you a result if you “just follow the steps.”

3. You can do a lot of work and see very little visible proof for a long time.

For a nervous system that hates uncertainty, this feels dangerous. When our intolerance of uncertainty is high, we tend to over‑plan, over‑research, seek reassurance, and delay decisions because we’re waiting to feel safe first. How many videos have you watched of “How to succeed on…”?

You can see how that played out for me:

I had limited time and energy. Exams and degree: guaranteed outcome. Substack and “my own thing”: no guarantees. So I put my energy where the rules were clear. I focused on my studies. I got my degree summa cum laude. My project on the side stayed in the trenches.

Looked at through that lens, it wasn’t a moral failure. It was a rational move.

If you’ve done the same - choosing the promotion over the experiment, the qualification over the creative thing - you’ve probably also just been applying the mindset that kept you safe and successful so far.

When that old mindset stops helping

The problem is not the mindset itself. It’s the mismatch.

In the “effort-equals-reward-world,” it makes sense to ask:

• What’s the correct answer?

• What’s the right sequence of steps?

• How do I avoid making mistakes?

In the “build-your-own-thing” world, those same questions keep you stuck. You hunt for the perfect strategy, the guaranteed roadmap, the expert who can tell you what will work. You treat every move as a test of your worth instead of a small experiment.

Entrepreneurship and creative work don’t come with that kind of certainty. Research on founders talks about “tolerance of ambiguity” as a key trait: the ability to stay in situations with incomplete information, conflicting signals, and no clear outcome yet.

If your whole life has rewarded you for eliminating ambiguity, entering a space where ambiguity is permanent will feel like walking into fog without a torch. Not because you’re weak, but because you’re in the wrong mental mode for this kind of work.

Learning to be “okay enough” with not knowing

You don’t have to love uncertainty. You don’t have to become someone who thrives in chaos. But you can practise being a little more okay with “not yet” than you were before.

A few ways to start:

1. Be precise about what you don’t know
“Everything is uncertain” is overwhelming. Try to narrow it down:

• Do you not know if it will work at all (outcome)?

• How long it will take (timeline)?

• Who you’ll be on the other side (identity)?

Simply naming the type of uncertainty can calm things down a notch.

2. Shorten the horizon
Your effort=reward trained brain wants a multi‑year plan.
Your builder‑brain only needs the next 2–4 weeks.

Pick a tiny experiment window.
For example:

• For the next three weeks, I will post two Notes and one short article each week.

• For the next month, I will reach out to four people about my work.

No grand promises. Just a clear, limited frame. The bigger questions ( such as “Is this the right thing?”) are allowed to sit in the background for now.

3. Think in experiments, not verdicts
In effort=reward‑mode, each project feels like a verdict on who you are.
In experiment‑mode, each project is just information.

After trying something, ask:

• What did I learn about myself?

• What did I learn about the people I want to reach?

This is close to how entrepreneurial thinkers are taught to operate: start with what you have, take a small step, see what reality says, adjust.

4. Put limits on input
When we feel uncertain, our reflex is to consume more advice. Ironically, that often spikes anxiety and leads to freeze (inaction). High intolerance of uncertainty is tied to endless information‑seeking and worry.

You can try:

• Choosing one or two sources you trust and ignoring the rest for a while.

• Taking a break from screenshots of income, “overnight success” threads, and aggressive growth advice.

Less noise makes it easier to hear your own thoughts.

5. Practise tiny doses of uncertainty on purpose
Tolerance builds with exposure. You don’t start with a leap; you start with a step.

For example:

• Publish something when it’s “good enough,” not perfect.

• Try a new format or topic without over‑researching it.

• Make a small offer and let it exist without refreshing responses every ten minutes.

The aim is not zero anxiety. The aim is: “I can feel this and still move.”

Seeing your “logical choice” differently

When I look back at that missing year now, it doesn’t feel like proof that I can’t stick with anything. It feels like evidence of how strong my old training was.

I picked the path with clear rules and guaranteed rewards because that was the only game I knew how to win.

If you’ve done the same, it doesn’t disqualify you from building something of your own. It just means that now, if you want this other life, you’re learning a different mindset: one that can live with more “not yet,” more “we’ll see,” more fog.

You don’t have to turn into a different person overnight. You only have to be slightly more willing to act without guarantees than you were last month.

That’s enough to start.

What others might not have guessed from the scene is that this same person has been talking behind my back for a long time. He has blamed me for all sorts of things at work, often to other colleagues, and I know this because people tell me. I have seen him do the same thing to others as well, although lately I have been the one most consistently in the line of fire.

To be honest, dealing with this is not easy. I still spend far too much time rehearsing the exact speech I would give if I decided to confront him. In my head, I say everything clearly and calmly. I name the pattern, I point out the dishonesty, and I explain exactly why this kind of behavior is so corrosive. It does not help much. It does not solve the situation, and it does not lower my stress level, but sometimes the mind insists on finishing a conversation that may never actually happen.

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What helps more is remembering the long game. I am building something on the side, planning a career change, and putting real energy into work that belongs to me rather than to this environment. When I shift my attention back there, the whole situation loses some of its grip. I still notice it, and I still dislike it, but I no longer feel quite so compelled to answer every provocation or mentally settle every score. I can go back, make small talk, and move through the room without needing to reveal everything I know.

Now that I think about it, when someone talks behind your back, it is often more about them than about you. It is usually a way of managing their own insecurities and feelings of inferiority, and of trying to position themselves more favorably with others. That does not make the behavior any less unpleasant, but it does help to see it clearly. It is not a reflection of what they think of you. It is a reflection of what they are trying to hold together in themselves.

That matters, because I am generally a strong believer in not letting things slide. I believe in standing up for yourself, naming mistreatment, and not collapsing into politeness when something is clearly off. But I also think there are situations where emotional regulation becomes the more important skill. Sometimes the other person is not looking for truth or resolution at all. Instead they are looking for a reaction, a crack in your composure, or proof that they can still shape your emotional weather. In those situations, not saying everything you know can become a form of power.

This is not the same as suppression. Suppression asks you to disconnect from your own experience and pretend that nothing is happening. Emotional regulation asks for something much more demanding: that you stay in touch with reality while choosing not to hand over your inner state so easily. It means noticing your anger without letting it drive the car. Staying aware of what hurts without making immediate discharge your only option. Deciding what deserves expression, what needs timing, and what is simply not worth exposing to the wrong person.

At the same time, I think it is important to be very mindful with this. Staying silent in stressful or confrontational situations can quickly become a habit, and not always a healthy one. I see this in practice often enough: people stay quiet about what is bothering them for so long that they slowly lose contact with the original feeling itself. What was upsetting gets pushed down, blurred over, or buried deeply enough that it no longer appears as a thought but as tension, exhaustion, irritability, or bodily symptoms. So this is not an argument for swallowing everything and calling it maturity. It is an argument for discernment, and for getting professional help when needed so that self-control does not quietly turn into self-erasure.

For me, the most useful thought in situations like this is very simple: the less I give away, the more power I keep. Not because I enjoy playing games, or because I think indirectness is some kind of virtue, but because there are moments when protecting your energy matters more than delivering the perfect speech. Sometimes staying grounded is more strategic than being expressive and keeping your attention on your own plans, your own work, and your own exit route is the clearest way of refusing to be pulled into someone else’s insecurity.

For anyone dealing with a similar dynamic, a few things may come handy:

• Stop expecting one perfect confrontation to resolve a pattern that is rooted in someone else’s character.

• Separate the actual facts from the endless mental rehearsing that follows them.

• Keep returning to your own work and your own direction, especially when the situation is starting to take up too much mental space.

• If you do decide to address it directly, it usually helps to do it from steadiness rather than from the desperate need to finally release pressure.

Not every conflict needs to be solved immediately, and not every act of restraint is weakness. Some situations need a boundary, some need distance, some need a future exit plan, and some need quiet self-control. That does not make the situation fair, and it does not make it pleasant, but sometimes it is the most practical way to protect both your position and your peace.

A body that suddenly became a “project”

Early in the month, my body stepped into the foreground: first with a stubborn illness that followed me home from Lisbon, then with a suspicious lump discovered on a routine mammogram, and finally with a biopsy. Waiting for results is its own kind of altered state: life goes on, you send campaigns, show up at university, help friends, but underneath, everything is organised around one unanswered question - and of course an intense attempt not to go down the self-diagnosing rabbit hole.

The result was benign, and I’m deeply grateful. But the experience reminded me how quickly our body can become a “task” to manage rather than a companion to listen to. This month I practiced speaking to my body less like a broken machine and more like someone who had just been through a lot and was doing her best.

Collective euphoria after years of suffocation

In the middle of all this, my country changed. An election that felt like “Democracy or Dictatorship” turned into something I’ll probably be processing for years. The days before the vote in the media were like a dark political thriller: secret services, information leaks, threats, fear, and a sense that everything could tilt the wrong way.

And then, one night, the streets filled with people crying, laughing, dancing. I watched older women jump out of cars to celebrate with twenty‑year‑olds, police hugging civilians, paramedics cheering, a future health minister dancing on stage. It felt like a nervous system exhaling after 16 years of holding its breath.

The next morning, the country was technically the same, and also very different. The university didn’t talk about it. Life “went back to normal.” But inside, something had shifted: a quiet, unfamiliar pride in my home.

Work, roles, and the weight of responsibility

Alongside the political and physical intensity, my professional life kept moving: finishing and printing my thesis in the middle of a cold, wrestling with Word and university bureaucracy, leading interviews for a new role at work, and building a psychodrama group from scratch.

One difficult life story after another sat across from me in those group interviews. By evening I felt emptied out and strangely full at the same time. Tired in my body, but clear that this is the work I want to keep doing. When my co‑leader fell apart in supervision, I carried more than I had planned. Being a marketing director, a nearly‑finished psychologist, and a group therapist in formation sometimes feels like walking around with three hearts and one body.

Small circles of care: dogs, dinners, countryside

Amidst the intensity, there were small circles of care that kept the month from swallowing me whole:

discovering a slightly hippy neighborhood in Lisbon and walking by the sea,
helping my best friend adopt a puppy I had found for her,
spending time with my own dog,
fixing a broken boiler at the countryside house,
hosting my brother and his new girlfriend,
sitting in the sun and doing almost nothing.

These weren’t big cinematic moments, but they stitched the month together. They reminded me that while we’re busy surviving politics, finishing degrees, launching groups, and waiting for medical results, life also looks like cooking, cleaning, dogs sleeping in patches of light, and friends telling you they’re about to give birth or that their relationship is breaking.

The invisible exhaustion of too many roles

Somewhere between the thesis, the election, the biopsy, the leadership trainings, the interviews, the dogs, the countryside boiler, the dinners and the supervision, I noticed something simple and not very poetic: I am exhausted. Not the dramatic, movie‑worthy kind, but the ordinary kind that comes from holding too many roles at once without ever naming that this is a lot.

Psychology has a word for this: role overload. When the roles we carry quietly grow bigger than the time, energy, and emotional resources we actually have. It doesn’t always look like burnout; sometimes it just looks like never really resting, always “catching up,” and wondering why even good news lands on a tired nervous system. This month I tried something new: instead of asking myself to be stronger, I began to simply acknowledge, “Of course you’re tired. Look at how much you’re holding.”

Some months are not about finishing things; they’re about learning how to hold several beginnings at once - your body, your work, your country, your relationships - all in transition, all at the same time.

This was one of those months for me.