13 Sep I Didn’t Know Who I Was Without The Job Title
This post is part of The Second Leap: a series about choosing uncertainty on purpose, twice. In 2015 we quit our jobs in advertising and built a life that didn’t look like many others’. Now, nearly 12 years later, we’re doing it again – bigger leap, more at stake, a 3-year-old in tow. You can start from the beginning here or keep reading below.
Nobody really warned us about this one.
We’d thought about the money, we’d thought about the logistics, and we’d thought (in a vague and optimistic way) about the adventure. What we hadn’t thought about at all was what happens to your sense of self when you remove the thing that’s been answering the question “so, what do you do?” for the last decade.
I was a creative director, Stevo was an art director. In advertising, those aren’t just job titles – they’re a fairly complete personality. You know what kind of person you are, where you sit in a room, what your opinion is worth, who finds you impressive and why. There’s a whole social architecture built around it.
The day we quit, that architecture disappeared, and for a while, I genuinely didn’t know what to put in its place.
The first time someone asked me what I did (maybe six weeks into the journey, on a train somewhere in Austria) I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Not because I was embarrassed, but because I actually didn’t know how to answer. “I used to be a creative director” felt odd, and “I’m an Instagrammer” felt absurd since we had maybe 600 Instagram followers at that point. “I’m on sabbatical” felt like I was performing a version of this that I hadn’t earned yet, so I think I said something vague about “taking photos” and changed the subject.
That discomfort lasted longer than I expected though…months, not weeks. There’s a particular kind of vulnerability in being in the middle of becoming something – when you’ve left the old identity behind but the new one hasn’t solidified yet. You’re in the gap, unlearning your past life while the new one takes its time arriving. And the gap is uncomfortable in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been in it.
What also surprised me was how much of Stevo’s identity was also wrapped up in mine. We’d been a creative couple in advertising (which was its own identity and its own social currency), and without the industry context, we were just two people with cameras and an uncertain plan. Figuring out who we were to each other, outside of the professional roles we’d played, was its own quiet project running underneath everything else.
It took about a year and a half before I stopped flinching at the question.
What changed it, eventually, wasn’t confidence or success – it was repetition. Saying “I’m a travel writer and content creator” enough times that it stopped feeling like a lie, and started feeling like a description. Building enough of a body of work that I had evidence to point to. Finding a community – this one, actually, the people who followed along – that reflected a version of us back to us that we could recognise and be proud of.
The identity catches up…but it catches up on its own timeline, not yours.
I think about this a lot now, with the second leap approaching. The identity question is different this time – I know who I am professionally, I know what we’ve built – but there’s a new version of it waiting in Australia. New country, new context, new social architecture to navigate from scratch. New answer to “so, what do you do?” in rooms where nobody has heard of us.
Elodie will probably sort this out faster than we do, since she’s three and her identity is fully portable 😅
See you soon with the next post,
Chanel (and Stevo & Elodie)
If you haven’t already, read Part 1 in the series: We’ve done this before. It doesn’t get less terrifying and here is Part 2: The number we didn’t tell anyone.
And if you’re new here, you can read more about how How Far From Home started here, or follow along on Instagram @howfarfromhome where we’re sharing the second leap in real time.
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