No job title can fully hold what you know how to do, how you care, or what you bring to change, leadership, and repair. In uncertain seasons, it helps to come back to the strengths and capacities that belong to you, no matter what role you hold.

You are so powerful and amazing, probably more than you allow yourself to realize and feel! And the systems of work are scared of your innate creativity and embodiment.

Trust me on this. I have the honor of hearing and holding your beautifully inspiring and deeply heartbreaking stories. Every single one of these folks - YOU - is beyond badass AF and amazingly multitalented. And every single one shares stories of institutional betrayal, exploitation, and manipulation for others’ gain. It’s the bad behavior inherent in the systems of patriarchy, late-stage capitalism, and colonialism.

Career uncertainty often brings grief, disorientation, and pressure to have the next answer before you have had time to process what changed. A more grounded next step is to slow down, notice what has shifted, and move forward with small, honest clarity.

What are you pissed off about right now?

I mean it. Because there are a lot of reasons to feel pissed off these days. And your work life is likely piling it on, too. 

Some of what I hear a lot of: last-minute requests, carrying way more than your share ‘because you’re so good at it.’ All the shifting expectations, sometimes blatantly. Other times, it’s the invisible rules no one told you about. The shock when people you work with show you exactly who they are.

Boundaries often start with a pause, not a dramatic no, and even one simple sentence can interrupt the urgency that keeps you abandoning your own capacity. Giving yourself a little more time creates space to respond more honestly instead of reacting from pressure, people-pleasing, or habit.

Overing often shows up this time of year dressed as responsibility, which is why pruning matters: not everything asking for your energy is yours to keep carrying. Choosing one honest thing to release can create room for what matters most and interrupt the habit of mistaking exhaustion for integrity.

Most of us did not learn overing by accident; we learned it in cultures that praise self-abandonment and call it passion.

Overing is (mental, emotional, and/or physical) disconnection from yourself, often in service of perceived expectations (both internal and external).

Mental overing comes with a compulsive “more-ness” that folks experience as “I’m not enough,” so they commit to more than is doable or required. “Doing it all” as a badge of honor, and so your creative ambition gets hijacked into busyness instead of purpose.

When we moved in December, I unpacked a few old “academic self-help” books by Donald E. Hall that I once assigned in introductory doctoral seminars. The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual is now more than twenty years old. Antiquated in the sense that it was written when tenure-track jobs and graduate school were a coherent, linear pathway, and the old guard of the academy still set the tone.

I trained a generation of scholarly leaders to navigate institutional cultures, decode their norms, and succeed within them. I mentored academic and professional identity formation for decades.

For many of us, our bodies intervene in our hustling identities. In 2016, my hustle identity demanded I fight back against the bodily injuries that came two weeks after I started therapy. I threw every type of healing modality at my herniated discs and the shingles that followed. I was determined to work my way back from injury with the same energy that got me there in the first place.

I wrapped up my 30s face-to-face with the physical and emotional tolls of chronic stress burnout and going into early menopause. These were all ruptures to my identity and my body. I learned the hard way that you can’t force summer energy across all the seasons of life without burning and crashing out. And it takes longer to heal when you’re staying in toxic dynamics and environments.

Differentiation is the most disorienting phase of career identity untangling.

It’s when you begin to ask:

What parts of me were shaped by institutional reward systems?
What parts were adaptations to my own beliefs and behaviors that I internalized?
What parts are actually mine based on my core values and impact work?

This is where essentializing becomes a practice of deinstitutionalizing your identity as separate and more authentic than your career and J-O-B roles.

As institutional promises fray, and downright betray many folks, the limits of those systems, the complicitness of them, become harder to ignore.

Right now, I’m hearing a lot of disorientation from betrayal, grief, and career shocks. You cared. You believed there were shared values mutually held. You felt you were living your purpose, calling, or impact through your work.

What’s going on is more than the erosion of a dream or the closing of a program or the loss of a job. It’s the collapse of you.

We’ve been practicing active rest by staying in the discomfort for a few more breath cycles instead of rushing to fix or produce. In the Grove, we’ve called this fallow grounding. Because we’re up against one of the most enduring institutional myths in this country: the illusion of constant growth.

This myth keeps you thinking linearly and striving upwards. It lives in the story that there are steps you can take to control the outcome. Just follow the rules and keep propping up the systems (capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.), then you too will succeed (in life, house, money, career).

Look around, and you’ll see where it’s gotten us. We are in our current polycrisis BECAUSE we’ve bought into the illusion of constant growth on every level