There comes a point — and I do wish somebody had told me this a decade earlier — where the question is no longer whether you can do the job. It is whether the job is still doing anything meaningful for you.
For a very long time, I confused capability with purpose. I was still good at what I did. Genuinely good, not falsely modest about it. But being good at something and feeling called to it are entirely different conditions, and I had long since stopped feeling called. What I had started feeling was stuck — which, from the outside, and often from the inside too, looks almost the same.
The role that once arrived as an opportunity had settled into a routine. The particular kind of routine that keeps you busy enough not to think too hard about whether any of it has anything to do with who you actually are. I had become, with uncomfortable clarity, a woman who was living to work, not working to build anything. Not working towards anything that felt real. Simply moving through the motions of a career that had stopped growing in any direction that mattered.
That is a very particular trap. Comfortable enough to stay in. Unfulfilling enough to hollow you out slowly, from the inside, where nobody can see it happening.
And then the atmosphere changed
Teams have their own weather. Anyone who has spent long enough inside one knows this instinctively — you feel the shift days before you could put a name to it. When the weather is good, everything is lighter than it has any right to be. When it turns, everything is heavier, and nothing on the org chart explains why.
A new peer joined. I want to be careful here, because this is not a story about one person, and I have no interest in making it one. But I would not be telling it honestly if I pretended the arrival made no difference. The dynamic that came into the room with her — the politics, the quiet undermining, the way a collaborative space seemed to lose its oxygen the moment she entered it — became, over months rather than days, unbearable.
I am not sure there is a polite way to say that somebody made coming to work feel like an endurance sport. But that is precisely what it became.
I watched colleagues withdraw. Then I felt myself withdraw, which was worse, because I had always rather prided myself on being the one who didn’t.
When managing the room becomes the job
Here is what actually exhausted me, and it took me years to be able to name it.
In 1983, a sociologist called Arlie Hochschild studied flight attendants and coined a phrase for something we had all been doing without a word for it: emotional labour. Her observation was that many jobs require you not merely to perform a task, but to perform a feeling — to produce, on demand, the correct facial expression and the correct warmth, regardless of what is actually happening inside you. And she drew a distinction that has stayed with me ever since. There is deep acting, where you genuinely summon the emotion. And there is surface acting. Where you arrange your face and hope nobody looks too closely.
Surface acting, she found, is what wears people out. Not the workload. The gap between what you feel and what you must display.
That is what my job had quietly become. The energy I had previously spent on the actual work was going almost entirely into managing the environment instead — navigating, deflecting, staying composed in rooms that had become quietly hostile, reading the temperature. Choosing the moment and arranging my face.
It is an exhausting way to spend your days, and it does not stay at the office. It follows you into the car. It sits down at your dinner table and joins in the conversation with your children. It wakes you at three in the morning to rehearse a meeting that is still eleven hours away and will not go the way you are rehearsing it.
If you are reading that and recognising your own three in the morning, I would gently say: that is not weakness, and it is not a personality flaw. It is the entirely predictable cost of a specific kind of work, and it is worth taking rather more seriously than I did.
I raised it
I did. Properly, and through the correct channels, and more than once.
It was noted that not much had changed.
And that — more than the meetings, more than the politics, more than any individual afternoon — told me everything I needed to know. Because an organisation’s tolerance for a corrosive presence is not a gap in its values, it is its values, expressed rather more honestly than anything printed on the wall by the lifts. What a company permits, it endorses. Not in its mission statement. In its rota.
I had spent years assuming that if I explained the problem clearly enough, to the right person, in the right tone, the institution would eventually do what it said it believed. That is a very seductive assumption, particularly for the sort of person who has always been good at explaining things clearly. It kept me there far longer than the evidence warranted.
My values were never going to find a home in that room. I had all the information I needed.
I was not quite ready to admit it yet.
Part 3
Which is the honest place to leave this, because the gap between knowing and acting is where most of a life gets quietly spent, and I lived in that gap for longer than I’d like to confess to you.
Next time: the moment I stopped waiting for things to change — and what it actually cost me to walk away.
This is my own story, told plainly — not advice, and certainly not a nudge. What you do with your own working life is yours alone.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
© 2026 TheJacquelineBrand. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish without written permission.
