Ep 10 Identity Beyond the Title: A Midlife Reinvention

What happens when someone asks "what do you do" and you genuinely don't have an answer anymore? In this episode of Really, Universe?, Mari tells the story of walking away from a corporate career at 54, retreating to a small Kansas town, and discovering she couldn't answer the most basic question at a hardware store. 

Drawing on Helen Ebaugh's research on role exit, Patricia Linville's self-complexity theory, and Mo Wang and Junqi Shi's review of retirement psychology, Mari unpacks why losing a job title can feel like losing yourself — and why that's a distinctly American cultural reflex, not a personal failing. She also connects this identity work directly back to the decision covered in Episode 9: the reason she could survive a massive career step-down at 59 was the identity work she'd already done five years earlier. Walk away with three tools: a real journaling exercise for building identity beyond your title, how to write a practice answer to "what do you do" that doesn't rely on a paycheck, and why letting people see your unfinished work matters more than waiting until you feel ready.

References

• Ebaugh, H. R. F. (1988). Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit. University of Chicago Press.
• Linville, P. W. (1987). Self-complexity as a cognitive buffer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Wang, M., & Shi, J. (2014). Psychological research on retirement. Annual Review of Psychology.

Socials

Youtube:

www.youtube.com/@maripeck

Website

https://www.reallyuniverse.com/

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

I stood in a hardware store in a small Kansas town, and someone asked me a question. I'd answered with pride for 30 years, and the only thing that came out of my mouth was stuff. It's it's hard to explain. That's not a joke, and it's not a throwaway line. That was a woman who used to run million-dollar budgets and stand in boardrooms, suddenly unable to finish a sentence about who she was. Stay with me. I've got an answer now. And it's not the one I expected. Hi, I'm Mary, and this is Really Universe. I'm 54 years old. I just walked away from corporate life after burning out completely. You heard a piece of this one in one of the other episodes, back in episode eight, I believe. The small Kansas town, the five years of hiking and soul searching. What I didn't tell you then is what happened the very first time someone at that small town life asked me the most ordinary question in the world. So what do you do? I'm not gonna lie, it caught me off guard. That was not a difficult question. It was one I'd answered with pride for decades, but my brain just couldn't come up with an answer. What do I do? Let's see. I journal, I hike, I play with my dog, I garden, I explore the meaning of life, but I'm guessing that's not what you're asking. So finally I said, and I'm not exaggerating, stuff. It's hard to explain. That was it. That was the whole sentence. A woman who had executive roles in multiple Fortune 500 companies, who had stood in boardrooms and told rooms full of people things that they didn't really want to hear, and I could not produce a single coherent sentence about who I was to a stranger at a hardware store stuff. It's it's hard to explain. I said some version of that for months. Here's what I didn't fully understand at the time. I thought the question, what do you do, was just small talk, an icebreaker, something that you answer and move past. What I didn't realize is how much load-bearing work my job title had been quietly doing in my sense of who I was for decades, without me ever once checking whether that was a good idea. For most of my adult life, my title told me and everyone else that I mattered. Take that away, and it's just not that the answer to a party question gets harder. It's that a piece of scaffolding that I'd built my entire identity on top of just got pulled out. And you find out real time how much of the building was actually resting on that one piece of scaffolding. It took a long time to quit caring about that scaffolding being gone. Longer than I expected. For someone who thought of herself as fairly self-aware and self-confident, I did a lot of journaling in that period, real journaling, the kind where you're not writing to sound wise later, you're writing because you genuinely don't know the answer and you're trying to find it somewhere on the page. I was reevaluating what I thought my value was, where it came from, and whether any of it was even true. Somewhere in that stretch, I was freelancing some instructional design projects, some consulting work, some writing, easy, effortless work, and I landed on a new answer. Oh, I freelance. That was it. And here's the accidental gift of small town Kansas. Most people there didn't fully know what freelancing meant. So they'd nod and the conversation would move on. I hadn't actually solved the identity question problem. I just found an answer vague enough that people stopped asking follow-up questions. That's not nothing. It got me through a lot of get-togethers. But it wasn't the same thing as knowing who I was. There's something worth naming here because I don't think it's just a personal quirk of mine. I think it's a specifically American reflex. In a lot of other countries, what do you do isn't even a normal getting to know you question. People lead with, hey, where are you from? What's your family like? What do you do for fun? Occupation comes later, if at all. In America, it's often the first thing we ask a stranger, or one of the first things, right after their name. What's your name? What do you do? And I don't think that's an accident. We've built a culture where a person's worth gets shorthanded into their job title before we know almost anything else about them. Which means that when you lose the title, it's not just you feeling unmoored, you're bumping directly into a cultural assumption that told you your entire life that the title was the point. That reframe actually helped me more than anything else I tried. It was a completely predictable response to a culture that trains everyone to answer this way. Around that same time, I started making some videos. Nothing to do with anything that I'm doing now. It was just a creative outlet, something that I was curious about learning. And here's the part that tells you everything about where my head still was. I wanted that to be completely secret. I did not want anyone who actually knew me to watch them. Not friends, not old co-workers, certainly nobody from my successful years. The idea of being seen doing something unpolished, unofficial, untitled, something that wasn't backed up by a business card felt exposing in a way that being an executive never had. I think about that a lot now, doing exactly this, making videos at a podcast under my own name on purpose and inviting people who do know me to watch. The version of me hiding those first videos couldn't have imagined this version. And the only real difference between them isn't skill or courage in some abstract sense. It's that I finally did the work of separating who I am from my official job title. I hear versions of this constantly from people who've never set foot in a boardroom or in a corporation. A stay-at-home parent whose youngest just started kindergarten, standing in the school pickup line for the first time without a baby on her hip, and suddenly surrounded by parents asking, Well, what do you do now that you've got your time back? As if the last five years weren't already a full identity. A man who spent 30 years as the guy who fixes things at the same plant, laid off in his final decade of work, discovering that half his friendships only existed inside that building, and none of them know how to talk to him now that he's not walking through the gate every morning. The job title is the most common version of this trap, but it's really just the loudest example of a bigger pattern. We let one role do all the identity work and then act surprise when losing it cost us more than we expected. Here's something worth thinking about, because it isn't obvious. A job title doesn't just describe what you do for eight hours a day. It comes with a whole social contract attached to it. People treat you differently based on it. They return your calls faster. They introduce you a certain way at parties. Your own family may have quietly treated you as more important while you carried it. Losing the title doesn't just remove a line from your resume. It removes a whole set of social signals that you'd got so used to that you stopped noticing that they were there until they weren't. That's part of why it hits so much harder than people expect going in. You're not just losing a paycheck or a task list, you're losing the invisible respect and automatic credibility that came attached to the label and having to find out sometimes uncomfortably fast how much of that respect you can generate on your own without a title doing the work for you. This is a big part of why so many people stay in jobs that they genuinely hate. It's not usually about the work itself, it's the fear that no other company would hand them the same title again, especially once you've climbed the ladder a few rungs. And here's something worth admitting. For a lot of people, the title matters more than the paycheck. I saw this up close for years, sitting on the other side of the table during annual performance reviews when I was in leadership positions. Motivation isn't the same for everyone on a team. Some people were always chasing the next title, the next promotion. That was the whole game for them. Some couldn't have cared less about the title and just wanted more money in their pocket. And some just wanted to feel recognized as long as their basic needs were covered, title and money barely registered. For what it's worth, I never considered myself to be much of a title person. What I actually cared about was being at a level where I could manage my own budget and make the real decisions that my team needed me to make. The title was just the access card that got me into the room and made that possible. So what was actually happening to me in that Kansas town? Because at the time it just felt like being lost. There's real research on exactly this transition, and it turns out that I was a fairly textbook case. Sociologist Helen Rose Fuchs Ebah, long name, spent years studying what she called the role exit, the process of leaving a role that's been central to your identity. She interviewed 185 people going through exactly this: ex-nuns, ex-cops, divorcees, retirees. And she found that the process reliably moves through four stages. The first stage is doubt, a growing sense that the role doesn't fit anymore, even if you can't say why yet. Second phase is seeking alternatives, trying on other possible identities, sometimes clumsily, sometimes in secret. Third, you find a turning point, a specific moment or decision where you commit to the exit. And fourth, you start constructing a new identity, as what she calls an ex, someone who carries the old role with them, but isn't defined by it anymore. I didn't have the language for any of that while I was living it. But looking back, it's almost embarrassingly precise. The doubt showed up as stuff, it's hard to explain. The seeking alternative stage was the freelancing, and I'd argue the secret videos, quietly trying on an identity I wasn't ready to claim out loud yet. The turning point was less a single moment and more a slow accumulation of journal entries. And the new identity is in part the person telling you this story right now. What I find most useful about Eboss Framework isn't just that it names the stages, it's that it treats the whole thing as a process rather than a personal failing with no roadmap. She interviewed ex-nuns who spent years unlearning a habit and a way of speaking to people, retirees who spent months not knowing what to do with their own mournings, divorced people who had to relearn how to introduce themselves at parties without a spouse's name attached. Every single one of them, across wildly different roles, moved through the same four stages. And that's oddly comforting. It means the disorientation isn't a sign that you're doing it wrong. It's a sign that you're doing it on schedule, the way everyone before you has. There's a second piece of research worth bringing in here, and I want to be upfront about something with this one. It's a well-known theory, but it hasn't held up perfectly under replication. So I'm giving you the honest version. Psychologist Patricia Lindville proposed something called self-complexity theory. The idea is that people who have more distinct selves, more independent roles, relationships, and identities that don't overlap much are better buffered when any single one of those selves takes a hit. If your entire sense of self-rest in one pillar, career, for example, and that pillar cracks, the whole structure shakes. If you've got several distinct pillars, parent, friend, reader, gardener, the person who shows up when someone's in crisis, losing one still hurts, but it doesn't take the whole building down with it. Some later studies have supported this. Some haven't replicated it very cleanly. The honest state of the research is that it's a compelling, partially supported theory, not an ironclad law. But even without perfect replication, it matches something that I live directly. My entire structure for years rested on one pillar labeled, I'm in management at a company you've probably heard of, or I work in corporate, or something equally impressive sounding. My kids were grown, I wasn't married, so my identity was mostly wrapped in my corporate role. When that pillar went, so did my ability to answer a simple question at a hardware store. The work I eventually did, the journaling, the reevaluating, was, without my knowing the academic term for it, an attempt to build more pillars. Mo Wang and Zheng Kui Xi published a comprehensive review of retirement psychology in the annual review of psychology. And one of their central points is that retirement, and by extension, any major role exit isn't a single event. It's a process that unfolds over months or years, shaped heavily by how flexible a person's sense of self already was going in, and how socially integrated they were outside of work in the first place. People who'd built more of their life outside their job before the exit adjusted faster and more completely than people whose whole social and personal world ran through the office. That timeline details matter more than it sounds like it should. We tend to expect these transitions to resolve on a schedule that matches how the rest of our lives move. A few weeks of adjustment, then back to normal. Wang and Xi's review makes it clear that that's not how it actually works. The adjustment period is measured in months and years, not days and weeks. And expecting it to resolve faster than it does just adds a second layer of frustration on top of the original disorientation. Now you're not just lost, you're also annoyed with yourself for still being lost longer than you think you should be. Knowing the actual timeline in advance doesn't make the process shorter, but it does make it less alarming while you're in the middle of it. Which brings me to the callback I actually want to make here. We talked in episode 9 about the decision that I made at age 59 when I was going through cancer treatment, unemployed, applying for what felt like 50 jobs a week, and taking a role that looked like a massive step down after being in director and management roles throughout my career. What I didn't say in that episode is that I don't think I could have taken that job at 59 if I hadn't already done this identity work at 54. The woman who couldn't answer what do you do at the hardware store had become someone who could accept an individual contributor title on paper without it costing her anything five years later. That's not two unrelated stories. That's the same work showing up twice. So if you're standing where I was, mid-reinvention, mid-retirement, mid anything, where the title's gone or going, here are three things that actually helped. Tool number one is the identity inventory or journaling. This is the one that matters the most, so don't skip it for the easier, shorter tools. Get an actual notebook or a blank document and ask yourself directly, why does this title matter so much to me? What do I believe I am without it? Don't answer fast. Sit with it for a few days if you need to. Keep coming back to it and answering it differently after a long walk. Then do the second half of the exercise, which is the part that actually rebuilds something. Make a real list of every quality, skill, role, and relationship that exists completely independent of your job. Not hobbies as a consolation prize, an actual honest inventory. Are you the friend that people call first in a crisis? Are you a member of a church group? Do you have clubs that you belong to? Are you a parent? Are you a sibling? Are you the person who remembers everyone's birthday? Are you an avid reader? Are you a gardener? Are you somebody who grows food or flowers? Write down more than feels natural to stop at. This is Linville's self-complexity theory done by hand. You're building pillars one line at a time. And while you're doing this, it's worth naming the cultural piece out loud because it removes some of the shame from the exercise. In most of the world, nobody leads with, what do you do? What's your job title? The way that Americans do. This isn't a personal defect that you built your identity around your job. It's a culturally trained reflex. If you want to make this more than a thought exercise, set a timer for 15 minutes and don't let yourself stop writing. Most people's first five items are pretty easy parent, sibling, friend. And then it gets harder. Which is exactly the point where the real information shows up. Keep going past the point where it feels done. The person who remembers things, the person who can fix almost anything with enough YouTube tutorials. The person who's an excellent decorator of the home. The person who can draw. Those are pillars too, even if there's no business card. Here's a few of the items that ended up on my list when I finally sat down and did it. Mother. Even though the kids are grown, that job is never really over. Someone who's rebuilt a life from nothing more times than once and knows now that I can do it again. A writer, whether or not anyone's paying for it. A gardener and a genuinely good one. I grew 80% of my own food during the pandemic, and every year that I lived in that small Kansas town. None of those needed a business card. All of them were true the entire time I was busy insisting that the only true thing about me was my email signature. Tip number two, write the practice answer to that dreaded question. Before you're asked, what do you do? Again, write out a real answer in advance. Not a job title, and not an apology for not having one. Here's where I'd start looking. Being a mother, father, sister, brother, friend, that's a complete answer. It's not a placeholder until you find a better one. I'm someone's mom. I read constantly. I grow most of my own food. Those are all full sentences about a full person. So is I'm a musician, or I'm a poet, or I'm the person my sister calls when she needs help. None of these need a paycheck attached to them to count as an identity. Write two or three versions. Say them out loud in the room by yourself before you ever need to say them in public. It does feel ridiculous, but do it anyway. The goal isn't to memorize a script, it's to prove to your own brain in advance that you have an answer that isn't stuff. It's hard to explain. I think about a friend of a friend who retired from teaching after almost 30 years, and for months, every time This person was asked what she used to do, she'd answer in the past tense and then trail off like the sentence itself was in morting. What finally worked for her wasn't finding a clever new title. It was realizing that she could say, I taught for 30 years and now I read constantly and I'm learning to paint badly on purpose. Past and present, both true, no apology in either direction. That's the shape a practice answer actually needs. Not a replacement title, just an honest current sentence you can say out loud. Tool three is maybe let someone see the unfinished thing. This one comes directly from my own secret videos, and it comes with a hard-earned caveat, so pay attention to this part. The instinct to hide the new, untitled, unofficial version of yourself until it's polished enough to justify existing is the exact same instinct that made the old title feel so load-bearing in the first place. Both are saying the same thing. I am only allowed to be seen once I've earned it. So, yes, pick one unfinished thing and let someone see it before you feel ready. But here's what I got wrong the first time I actually tried this. I showed my videos to a local friend and she had all kinds of critiques, lots of them. It turns out she wasn't remotely part of my target audience. Of course she wanted something different than what I was making, because I wasn't making it for her. Her feedback wasn't wrong. It was just irrelevant. And irrelevant feedback delivered while your confidence is already fragile can do real damage. It's actually why I went right back to hiding everything from everyone for a while after that. So the tool isn't show everyone, it's show the right someone. Someone who's actually in your target audience, if you have one, or someone whose job in that moment is to be encouragement, not critique. You can even say that out loud. Hey, I need support right now, not notes. When your confidence is already low is exactly the wrong time to hand a stranger or even a well-meaning friend an opening to tell you what's wrong with something you're not ready to defend yet. This shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Someone picks up watercolor painting in their 60s and won't show a single piece to their own spouse for a year because it isn't good enough yet. Meanwhile, the point was never gallery quality work. The point was doing something with no title attached and surviving being seen doing it badly. A recently divorced man joins a beginner pickleball league and spends the first three weeks pretending he's just there to watch, because admitting that he's starting from zero at something feels worse than not trying at all. In every version of this, the fear isn't really about the skill level. It's about being witnessed without a title to hide behind. Do it anyway. Just do it in front of the right person. The title never protected you as much as you thought it did. And the unfinished thing won't expose you the way it feels like it will, as long as you're not handing it to someone who is never going to understand what you were making in the first place. Here's the part that still makes me laugh though, even now, and genuinely the best job I've ever had, making more money than I've ever made in my life. Someone asked what I do, and I still sometimes hear myself say stuff, it's hard to explain. Because the truth is, my job actually is hard to explain to most people outside of a corporate environment. Try telling someone who's never worked in one that I designed training for software engineers without being a software engineer myself. It doesn't compute for them. There's no clean one-word title for what I do, the way that there is for a nurse or a teacher. Something everyone instantly understands and respects on site. So in a strange way, this has come full circle for me, the exact same sentence that used to come out of a place of total identity collapse now comes out of a place of honestly total confidence. Same words, completely different woman saying them. Hey, if you're in the middle of this right now, if someone asked you recently what you do and you heard yourself say some version of stuff, it's hard to explain. I want you to know that's not a sign of anything that's wrong with you. It's a sign of scaffolding coming down, and that's exactly the necessary part before anything new gets built. It took me years to answer that question without flinching. Not because I was slow to figure it out, but because I was doing real work, understanding my own value in the world. The doubting, the trying on, the slow turning point, the journaling nobody saw, all of it counted. Even the parts that just looked like sitting in a small Kansas town not knowing what came next. And if you're the person standing at your own version of that hardware store right now, fumbling that question, here's the only thing that I'd ask you to believe. The discomfort that you're feeling isn't proof that you've lost yourself. It's proof that you're between two versions of yourself. And there's no shortcut through that gap that skips the disorientation. Everyone who's ever done this, everyone who's ever had to change careers, been unemployed, every retiree, every ex-nun in Ebaz research, every person who's ever had to answer a party question without the title that they used to lean on, walked through the exact same fog before they came out the other side with an answer that was actually theirs. Hey, if this one landed and you're enjoying these videos, I hope that you'll subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Be sure to drop a comment down below and let YouTube know how much you're enjoying these videos. And check out my new website, reallyuniverse.com. Subscribe to the newsletter there and be the first to get notified the moment new episodes drop. There's research references in the show notes. I'm glad you're here. Until next time.