Becoming a 🦋

For my first blog post, I wanted to share some of the realizations I’ve had one month after leaving a toxic workplace. Sadly, when I look back, I can barely recognize the person I was. Who was this person?

Without realizing it, I had been slowly dismantling or sabotaging the version of myself I’d spent over 10 years building in corporate America, a persona that had become so entwined with my job that it was my identity. I rebelled in small ways: refusing to blindly design what they told me, refusing to stretch past my own boundaries, refusing to go above and beyond for a promotion, and refusing to work later or harder just to prove I belonged.

I started being too honest with leadership, which put me on a blacklist and placed a target on my back. I began sharing my failures with my peers and owning my growth areas because I was still learning how to be a leader. I noticed how being so open made my manager recoil. I can still feel her look of anger, as if I’d betrayed some unspoken rule.

At the time, I thought I was being stupid and reckless. I had never been this honest and emotional at work. With friends and family, yes, but not in meetings or in front of peers and leaders.

Now I understand what was happening. My unconscious shadow self was breaking through the carefully crafted persona I had built, carrying with it all the traits I had repressed or left unresolved. I was being tested. The values I believed defined me: kindness, compassion, generosity, forgiveness were challenged by the opposite behaviors of others, not just from workplace leaders, but even from close friends.

I lived in daily anguish for 6 months because what I saw in them felt like a mirror, reflecting back the parts of myself I hadn’t yet faced: the anger over small things, the dismissiveness, the selfishness, the arrogance and more. I resisted it all intensely, not realizing I was fighting with myself, It felt as if I was dying while still alive.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate“
– Carl Jung

I couldn’t find the energy to look for another job, to fight back, or even to leave on my own. Every strategy I’d used before had stopped working. I blamed everyone; I tried all the traditional methods to fix myself, and nothing worked. But my soul was done with that persona. It demanded that I burned my old life to the ground and wait in the ashes until no remnant of my former self could rise again.

After a month in the ashes, I have understood that this breaking point was necessary: it drew my inner artist out of the caves of my soul and forced me to confront the parts of myself I had long rejected. That identity I clung to was never truly me, it was a mask built from fear, trauma, and survival. Only when I reclaimed those lost pieces I began to heal and step into my true self.

I feel different now. I’ve reclaimed my life, my creativity, and my sense of purpose. I don’t have a clear plan for what comes next, and maybe that’s the point, this story doesn’t need an ending yet.

What I do know is that I want to stay open, to say yes to whatever interesting opportunities cross my path. I’ve signed up for sewing classes, started learning to cook, and picked up painting again, sometimes with friends, sometimes just for myself. I don’t know exactly what’s ahead, but I know it’ll be far better than the life I left behind.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

– Carl Jung