Who Are You When the Role Changes?
The past couple of days I've been nursing a virus. Nothing serious, but serious enough that I've felt fatigued and taken long naps in both the morning and the afternoon. If you know me, you know that's highly unusual.
What surprised me wasn't how exhausted I felt.
It was how guilty I felt.
Lying in bed last Thursday afternoon, my mind kept drifting to all the things I "should" be doing. Writing this article. Working out. Exploring Santa Fe. Taking a dance class. Building my business.
It got me thinking.
Maybe I wasn't just fighting a sinus infection. Maybe I was bumping up against an identity I'd built over decades.
I've always considered myself a highly productive person. I genuinely enjoy creating, building, learning, solving problems, identifying patterns, and trying new things. Most days, I wake up excited about what's ahead.
But what happens when life temporarily—or permanently—takes one of those things away?
Who am I if I'm not producing?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized this isn't really about me or about a sinus infection.
It's about identity.
I've watched physicians struggle with retirement because they no longer know who they are if they aren't practicing medicine. I've seen attorneys leave the courtroom after decades of representing clients and quietly wonder what's next. Executives retire from careers they've devoted their lives to and suddenly miss not just the work, but the identity that came with it.
Some people absolutely thrive in retirement. They travel, mentor, volunteer, learn new hobbies, deepen friendships, and somehow seem even more energized than they were while working.
Others flounder.
The difference isn't retirement.
It's whether they believed their profession was something they did or who they were.
The same thing happens outside of work.
A mother whose children leave home and no longer need her in the same ways.
An entrepreneur who sells the business she spent twenty years building.
A man whose wife of sixty years dies and suddenly finds himself wondering, Who am I if I'm no longer a husband sharing life with my lifelong companion?
Life has a way of changing our roles.
Sometimes gradually.
Sometimes overnight.
When it does, it quietly asks each of us the same question:
Who are you now?
As I reflected on my own life, I realized something I hadn't fully appreciated before.
On paper, it looks like I've reinvented myself several times.
I was a highly ambitious student.
Then I built a business with Mary Kay, where my favorite part wasn't selling skincare. It was encouraging women to believe they were capable of more than they thought.
Later, I became an estate planning attorney and built My Pink Lawyer®. People often assume my work was about wills and trusts. It wasn't, at least not to me. What I loved was helping people make thoughtful decisions they felt at peace with and making one of the hardest days their families would ever experience just a little bit easier.
Today, through My Thrive Life™, I help accomplished women recognize the hidden patterns shaping their experience so they can consciously create a life and work they genuinely enjoy.
Three very different seasons of life.
Or are they?
Joy isn't found in a job title. It's found in how we choose to participate in the life we're living.
When I look beneath the job titles, I don't actually see three different versions of myself.
I see one.
I've always been drawn to helping people feel more capable, more intentional, and more at peace with the lives they're creating.
The vehicle changed.
The expression changed.
The mission never really did.
That realization brought me an unexpected sense of peace.
Maybe our roles aren't our identity after all.
Maybe they're simply one way our identity expresses itself during a particular season of life.
If that's true, then retirement doesn't require us to become someone new.
Neither does selling a business, changing careers, becoming an empty nester, losing a spouse, or recovering from a virus that forces us to slow down.
It simply invites us to find a new way to express what has always been true about us.
As I lay there taking yet another afternoon nap, I realized my guilt wasn't really about resting.
It was about the story I was telling myself about what resting meant.
Once I noticed that, I had a choice.
I could continue believing that productivity determines my worth.
Or I could accept the reality that, for a couple of days, my body needed something different from me.
I chose the nap.
Not because I've suddenly become someone who loves lying around all day. Trust me—that's still a work in progress. But because I'm learning that participating well in life sometimes means building, sometimes means creating, sometimes means exploring, and sometimes it simply means giving your body permission to heal.
Maybe that's the invitation for all of us.
Not to cling so tightly to the roles we've played that we lose sight of the person underneath them.
Our careers will change.
Our relationships will evolve.
Our children will grow up.
Our bodies will age.
The seasons of our lives will come and go.
But the qualities that make us who we are—our values, our gifts, our capacity to love, encourage, create, learn, serve, and contribute—don't disappear when a role does.
They simply ask to be expressed in a different way.
So perhaps the better question isn't:
Who am I if I can no longer play this role?
Perhaps it's this:
What has always been true about me, regardless of the role I've been playing?
I suspect the answer to that question is far more enduring than any title we've ever held.
If this resonated with you, I'd encourage you to spend a few quiet minutes reflecting on that last question. You may be surprised by what emerges.
If you're curious about the philosophy behind these ideas, you can explore more on the Framework page at My Thrive Life™. And if you're navigating a major life transition yourself, I'd love to hear your story (contact me here). Those seasons often reveal more about who we are than the comfortable ones ever do.
