Looking back. Looking ahead.
How does a professional in her 40's become relevant again?
I don’t have the answer.
But I am looking for one.
I have been working since I finished college in 2002. In those years, I have built a career, changed directions, taken breaks when I needed them, left jobs I no longer connected with, and, at different points, allowed myself to follow my own whims and fancies — doing what felt right for me at the time. I have navigated frequent changes, sometimes embraced them and sometimes resisted the pressure to become what the situation required me to be.
I have often called myself a misfit.
A little bit of a rebel, perhaps. Someone who has never been particularly good at fitting in simply for the sake of fitting in. Not because I was unwilling to understand or learn from another point of view, but because pretending to agree, or conditioning myself to fit into something simply because it was easier or more amiable, was never easy for me.
I have paid a price for that.
Of course I have.
I am sure I have been perceived as aloof. Rigid. Too straightforward. Difficult. Perhaps even aggressive at times. Not adaptable enough.
And if I am being honest, some of those perceptions may not be entirely wrong.
But there is another side to that story.
I chose.
I chose to speak up when I saw someone weaker being treated unfairly, even when staying quiet would have been far easier.
I chose to say something when saying nothing would have attracted far less attention — and certainly less unwanted attention.
I chose to walk away when something consistently made me unhappy or when I felt I was no longer in the right place.
I have avoided situations, yes. But rarely because I was afraid of confrontation. I simply didn’t always see the value in staying in environments that felt negative, uncomfortable or fundamentally out of balance with what mattered to me.
And when I believed in something, I stayed.
I worked long hours when I felt the work mattered. I gave more when I believed in the people, the purpose or the outcome. And when my priorities changed, or something stopped making sense for the person I was at that particular point in my life, I wanted to move on.
Depending on where you stood, I could apparently be very professional — or completely unprofessional.
Can a person really be both?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps the choices we make, the people we work with, the environments we find ourselves in and the things we value at different stages of our lives bring out different versions of us.
Whatever the reason, one thing remains.
We live with the reputation we create for ourselves.
A wanderer.
A maverick.
A rebel.
Someone who can be difficult to handle.
Someone who doesn’t always stay.
Someone whose career path doesn’t look particularly linear.
I suppose I own all of those descriptions.
Because, in some way, they have all been me.
And now I find myself in my 40s, looking at a professional world that seems to value stability almost as much as capability.
And this is where it gets uncomfortable.
I find myself looking at my own career through a lens I didn’t necessarily use when I was living it.
What felt like a series of choices, changes, pauses and new beginnings at the time now appears, when placed together on paper, as a career that doesn’t follow a particularly straight line.
And I understand how that can be read.
But I also find myself wondering what gets lost when a career is viewed primarily through its chronology rather than through the experiences within it.
The roles, the organisations and the dates tell one story.
The person who moved through them carries another.
A career is often reduced to a sequence of dates, titles and organisations.
A few lines on a page become a summary of a person.
And I understand why.
Organisations want stability. They want people they can invest in. They want to understand what someone has done, where they have stayed and what they might bring to the role.
These are reasonable things to look for.
But I wonder whether, somewhere along the way, we have become too comfortable with assuming that a linear career is the clearest measure of a person’s value.
Can a piece of paper really tell you how capable someone is?
Can it tell you how they think?
How quickly they learn?
How they respond when things go wrong?
Whether they take ownership?
Whether they care?
Whether they bring energy into a room?
Whether they can connect different experiences and turn them into something useful?
Whether they can make something better than it was before?
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Not always.
A CV can tell you where someone has been.
It cannot necessarily tell you what those experiences have made them capable of.
And perhaps this is where my own thinking about consistency has changed.
For a long time, I valued freedom more than stability.
I wanted the ability to make choices based on what felt right at that particular point in my life. I wanted to move when something no longer felt right. I wanted to explore when something interested me. I wanted to follow opportunities, even when they didn’t necessarily form a neat career plan.
I don’t regret that.
But I do understand something differently now.
Consistency has value too.
There is something reassuring about staying the course, building something over time and seeing your experience deepen with continuity.
I actually crave some of that now.
A place to build.
A place to grow.
A sense of continuity.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
Perhaps this is one of the things that happens as we get older. The things we once resisted begin to look different when viewed from another stage of life.
I have started to appreciate the value of consistency in a way I perhaps didn’t earlier. There is something reassuring about staying the course, building something over time and seeing your experience deepen with continuity.
But that doesn’t make a non-linear path any less valuable. It simply means that different choices give us different experiences, and perhaps we only understand the value of those experiences when we look back at them from where we are today.
And perhaps that is the part of my own story I am still trying to understand.
Was I too quick to leave?
Did I sometimes choose discomfort over compromise when compromise might have served me better?
Did some of my choices make my career harder than it needed to be?
Probably.
Would I make every decision in exactly the same way today?
Probably not.
But I also don’t want to look back at the person I was and dismiss her choices simply because they don’t create a neat narrative on paper.
She was making decisions with the understanding, priorities and circumstances she had at the time.
And perhaps that is what experience really is — not a perfectly executed plan, but a collection of choices, consequences, lessons and perspectives that slowly shape the person you become.
So here I am.
In my 40s.
With a career that may not look particularly conventional, but with experiences that have given me more perspectives than a straight line ever could.
And I find myself asking a different question now.
Not Why doesn’t my career look more stable?
But:
How do I make all of this matter?
How do I take the experiences that don’t neatly sit beside one another and make sense of the whole?
How do I translate years of different environments, people, roles, challenges and choices into something that has value today?
How do I remain curious enough to keep learning while experienced enough to know what I bring to the table?
How do I evolve without feeling that I have to erase the person I have been?
Perhaps relevance, especially in your 40s, isn’t about starting again.
Maybe it is about understanding what all the years have added up to.
It is about recognising the skills that travelled with you, even when the job titles changed.
The judgement that came from experience.
The resilience that came from starting over.
The perspective that came from seeing different sides of a business.
The ability to read people and situations.
The willingness to question.
The ability to learn.
And perhaps even the courage to admit that some of the things you once valued are no longer what you need.
Maybe the challenge is not becoming someone new.
Maybe it is learning how to articulate the value of the person you have already become.
I don’t know yet if I have the answer.
But I think I am finally asking a better question.
How does a professional in her 40s, with a career that has wandered rather than followed a straight line, make herself relevant — not by becoming more conventional, but by understanding and communicating the value of everything that came before?
That is the question I want to explore.
And perhaps this is what the next chapter is really about.
Not starting over.
But making sense of everything that has brought me here.
