mental-health

Orientation, not arrival

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A person walking along a dirt path towards a city skyline, with a signpost indicating the direction, under a clear blue sky.

This is the final piece in a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

(if you haven’t read Part One and Part Two, read those first)

Ten years on, I’m not especially interested in tidy origin stories or triumphant endings.

What I have instead is orientation.

For a long time, I thought comfort meant stability: a role you could explain in one sentence, a trajectory you could sketch on a whiteboard, a sense that you were “on track”. I no longer think that. Comfort, as it turns out, isn’t the absence of change. It’s the ability to exist inside change without being overwhelmed — or taking it personally.

That distinction has taken years to learn.

Earlier in my career, I absorbed the idea that legitimacy had to be earned constantly. In the banking environment I worked in, surrounded by people who seemed far more confident, polished, and socially assured than I felt, I carried a low-level sense of being a chancer. Someone who’d slipped through a side door and needed to justify their presence.

So I worked harder. Stayed later. Took on more. Put my hand up when others didn’t. I treated exhaustion as evidence that I was doing it right. If I could just make myself indispensable enough, visible enough, useful enough, then my credentials couldn’t be questioned.

It’s not hard, in hindsight, to see where that leads.

These days, I’m better at holding uncertainty without immediately turning it into a personal failure. I don’t always get it right, but I’m quicker to notice when I’m reacting rather than responding.

That difference matters. Reaction wants certainty and closure. Response allows for partial information, for waiting, for keeping options visible. I make fewer decisions in a rush to feel safe. I’m more deliberate about what I lock in, and what I leave adjustable.

I expect the ground to shift, so I design for movement.

Being multi-hyphenated is often framed as a lack of focus. For me, it’s closer to a coping mechanism in a world that refuses to sit still. I don’t treat optionality as indecision; I treat it as resilience. I commit, but only lightly. I choose depth over novelty, without betting everything on a single version of relevance.

What I notice now, more than anything, is range — the ability to move between depth and breadth without losing my footing.

I have work that still interests me — not because it’s new, but because it’s deep. I work with people I respect, on problems that are hard in ways that matter. I have space for thinking, for writing, for changing my mind in public and in private.

I have a working life that accommodates curiosity and contradiction. One that leaves room for travel, for friendships, for health, for creative detours that don’t need to justify themselves immediately — or maybe ever. None of this arrived quickly or neatly. Very little of it could have been predicted at the outset.

But it’s a life that fits — not perfectly, but well enough.

Titles still don’t quite capture what I do. They probably never will. I’ve stopped trying to compress a complex working life into a single, tidy label. Some ambiguity is simply the price of doing work that spans systems, disciplines, and contexts. And that’s ok.

What’s changed is that I’m no longer looking for a final definition.

Writing has helped with that. It’s given me a place to be authoritative on my own terms — not by pointing at outputs, but by articulating patterns, judgement, and expertise. Over time, I’ve come to trust that credibility doesn’t only come from what you reveal. It also comes from sharing how you think.

And I’m comfortable saying this plainly: I have a bloody great life.

Not because everything worked out. Not because there was a master plan. But because enough worked out. Because the work is meaningful, the people are interesting, and the days contain more choice than they once did, and I wake up every day (well, most days) feeling like I’m making a positive difference to people’s working lives.

There wasn’t a moment of arrival. There still isn’t.

What there is, is a steadier way of standing while things move. A clearer sense of what I’m willing to tolerate, and what I’m not. The confidence that I can adjust my stance as the ground shifts — because it always will.

I’m not finished. I’m not “there”.

But I’m facing in the right direction.

And, for now, that’s enough.

The Long Middle

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A surreal image of a woman standing with her back to the viewer on large stone slabs that are broken apart and floating above a reflective surface, with a wide blue sky and clouds stretching out ahead of her.

This is part two of a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

(if you haven’t read Part One yet, read that first)

Leaving got me out of a toxic situation. It solved the urgent problem — but it didn’t hand me a new map.

What followed wasn’t clarity or momentum, but a long stretch of recalibration.

There wasn’t a clear trajectory. There still isn’t. What changed was my tolerance for that.

In the early years after I left, I spent a fair amount of time trying on different versions of myself. Some of this was curiosity. Some of it was necessity. And some of it was the lingering belief that “progress” ought to look like movement towards something newer, shinier, or more obviously impressive.

I flirted with adjacent worlds — product, innovation, startups — not because I was particularly drawn to them, but because they seemed to represent where the action was. In contrast, going back to intranets and the digital workplace initially felt like a step backwards. I’d internalised the office pyramid: bigger portfolios, bigger teams, broader remits. Returning to a domain I’d started in felt uncomfortably like reversing down the ladder.

At the time, I was still measuring myself by scope rather than substance. Portfolio size rather than domain authority.

That shifted once I stopped borrowing other people’s career templates.

Joining forces with my now-business partner was a turning point. Not because it suddenly clarified everything, but because working in partnership changed the texture of my working life. Ideas became conversational rather than solitary. Drafts were sharpened through debate. Momentum came not from self-discipline alone, but from shared accountability. If I promised something by the end of the day, it happened — not because of pressure, but because I’d said it out loud to someone whose judgement I trusted.

More importantly, partnership reflected my strengths back to me.

Returning fully to intranet and digital workplace work stopped feeling like retreat, and started to feel like reclaiming something I was genuinely expert in. What had once felt “unsexy” now felt deep, consequential, and hard-earned. I stopped apologising for caring about work that sits at the intersection of people, systems, governance, and power — because that’s where things actually succeed or fail in complex organisations.

One of the more disorienting parts of this period was realising that a skill I’d come to doubt was, in fact, central to my value.

In my last job, the authority to do this work — rolling the pitch, preparing the ground, building buy-in — was quietly withdrawn, and with it went my confidence. Politics was treated as something faintly embarrassing — a distraction from “real” work — rather than the environment in which real work actually happens.

After the break knocked my confidence, I lost sight of the fact that understanding how organisations function is a skill in its own right. Knowing what a project sponsor is carrying. Recognising where resistance is coming from. Being close enough to the reality of organisational life to empathise — but far enough away to offer perspective and judgement.

The first time an old colleague hired me to support them at another organisation specifically for that capability, it was a genuine eureka moment. Not because I’d suddenly acquired a new skill, but because I could finally see clearly again what I’d been doing all along.

Consultants are often accused — sometimes fairly — of proposing ideas that sound elegant in theory but collapse in the cold light of day. What I’d been led to question wasn’t a weakness. It was the craft: working with context rather than around it, acknowledging politics instead of pretending they don’t exist, and offering help that is grounded, realistic, and usable.

That balance — empathy without over-identification, distance without detachment — turned out to be the thing that makes my work stick.

That realisation didn’t instantly restore confidence. Confidence lagged behind evidence. I had to stop apologising for how I work — and that happened slowly, unevenly, over years rather than months.

Identity, meanwhile, remained unresolved. Losing a job title I’d spent a decade chasing was harder than I expected. “Head of digital comms at a bank” collapsed overnight into “freelancer”, with all the ambiguity that entails. Titles are crude, but they’re socially useful shorthand, and I missed having one that did the explanatory work for me.

Go too narrow, and you limit the range of work you’re considered for. Go too broad, and you dissolve into a sea of digital hand-waving. I still feel that tension. But I’ve stopped treating it as a problem that needs solving.

This wasn’t simplification so much as a recognition of complexity.

Another quiet shift during this period was my relationship to impact and evidence. Working for large, complex organisations means you can rarely talk openly about what you’re doing. Commercial confidentiality applied in my last role, and it still does. For a while, I struggled with that invisibility — the inability to point to outputs, launches, or neat before-and-after stories.

What helped was returning to writing. Twitter (RIP), LinkedIn, and blogging gave me a way to be authoritative without breaching confidence. I didn’t need to show the workings to demonstrate the thinking. Over time, I became more comfortable with the idea that much of my value lies not in what I produce directly, but in the choices I help organisations make — including the mistakes they avoid.

Conditions during this period were far from perfect. I still wish I’d left my last job on better terms, with a clearer plan and some savings behind me. For a long time, I was angry — not just about how it ended, but about the injustice of it all. About being made to feel like a failure by an organisation that had benefited from my willingness to stretch, absorb, and endure.

That anger was oddly clarifying.

It stripped away some of the residual self-doubt and forced a reappraisal of what I’d normalised. I could see more clearly how readily I’d equated over-extension with professionalism, and how easily I’d absorbed responsibility for failures that weren’t mine to carry.

The anger didn’t vanish quickly. It lingered. It resurfaced, often out of nowhere. For a while, it was part of how I made sense of what had happened.

But over time, it loosened its grip.

It stopped being the engine of the story and became part of the context instead — something I could acknowledge without letting it define how I saw myself or what came next.

This phase of my career wasn’t about reinvention. It was about unlearning — letting go of borrowed hierarchies, inherited measures of success, and my habit of treating uncertainty as a personal failing.

The long middle taught me to live without a script. To value depth over novelty. To accept that some careers don’t resolve into clean arcs, and that progress is sometimes a matter of stance rather than speed.

The ground kept shifting. I learned to stand differently.

Now read Part 3, Orientation, not arrival.

The Break

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A surreal painting showing a woman in a dark business suit, seen from behind, stepping through an open door that leads into a blue sky filled with clouds. Behind her is a dim office interior with a desk and lamp fading into shadow.

This is part one of a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

I didn’t leave my last employed role because I was brave, burned out on corporate life, or driven by some entrepreneurial calling.

I left because staying had become untenable.

By the time I quit, I was exhausted, unwell, and out of road. Not in a dramatic way — but in the slow, grinding way that comes from trying to make an impossible situation workable for too long.

For over a year, I’d been doing the work of two, arguably three people. I spent a year living in a hotel on the other side of the world to deliver a project against an unrealistic deadline, with neither enough resources nor senior support. Alongside that, I was managing two teams across eight time zones — a logistical and emotional load that never let up.

I did all of this willingly. Partly out of professional pride. Partly out of ambition. And partly because I believed (and was quietly encouraged to believe) that if I proved myself hard enough, everything would eventually resolve.

I was chasing a promotion I thought I needed, and a bonus that had been dangled just far enough ahead to keep me running. Early in that financial year, I discovered that someone in my team, with significantly less responsibility and a lighter workload, was being paid more than I was. When I raised it, I was told it couldn’t be fixed — but that it would be rectified at bonus time.

In retrospect, I was a mug.

Then came the reorganisation.

It was badly handled, driven more by internal politics than how teams actually function. My team was disbanded — a fact I didn’t learn in a meeting, or even on a phone call, but via a text message from a junior team member, because my manager had forgotten to invite me to the meeting.

Shortly afterwards, I was moved under a new manager who neither understood nor valued digital, and who had little appetite for making a success of a platform I’d spent the previous year delivering. Because it wasn’t their idea, it was quietly undermined — along with the person responsible for it.

By then, my body had already started to register what I was still trying to rationalise. I barely slept. I was constantly tense. I was ill with stress in a way I’d never experienced before. I took a few days off sick — the only sick leave I took in the whole time I worked there — and received an email from HR informing me that if I remained off, my pay would be withdrawn.

It wasn’t framed as concern. It was framed as process.

That was the moment the spell broke.

Up until then, I’d still been operating under the illusion that if I just worked harder, explained myself better, or endured a bit longer, the situation would right itself. That email made it clear this wasn’t a misunderstanding or a temporary rough patch. The system had made its position known.

I didn’t quit because I was brave. I quit because I had reached the limit of what I could reasonably absorb.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a career decision so much as a physical and emotional necessity. I didn’t leave on good terms. I didn’t have a plan or a financial cushion. I left carrying a messy mix of anger, relief, fear, and a deep sense that I’d somehow failed.

Looking back, I wish I’d been kinder to myself.

I wish I’d trusted my own signals sooner, rather than forcing my body to escalate the message. I wish I’d recognised that enduring harm isn’t professionalism, and that loyalty to a system that isn’t reciprocated is rarely rewarded.

Ten years on, I don’t romanticise that moment — but I respect it. Walking away wasn’t a career move. It was an act of self-preservation.

And everything that followed began there.

Part two, The Long Middle, is here.