For a long time, I worried I was becoming less relevant.
I stepped away from a high-level design role in the outdoor industry shortly after becoming a mother, but not in the clean, intentional way that sentence can make it sound. I was the one who ultimately quit, but I did not leave fully by choice. I left under pressure, after trying to sustain a role that had been too large and too demanding from the beginning.
It was a high-level, high-pressure position, and I had spent years operating at a pace that was difficult to maintain even before I became a parent. I had set a very high standard for myself, and eventually that standard became the expectation around me. When I became a mother, I thought I would somehow add that role alongside everything I was already carrying. I could not. The work required too much. Parenthood required too much. I was also the primary breadwinner, living in the Bay Area, and there was very little room for error in any direction.
That experience is not universal, but it is real. High-level, high-pressure roles do not always bend easily around parenthood, especially when the person in the role has already been operating beyond a sustainable capacity. The structure I was working inside no longer fit the structure my life required.
Once I stepped outside of that structure, I discovered something I had not fully understood before: it can be very hard to find your way back into a system when the role you used to occupy no longer fits.
Over the years that followed, I tried many different ways of working. I consulted, freelanced, built ideas, started my own projects, wrote, created, and taught. I looked for ways to work independently so I could control my schedule and still contribute at the level I knew I was capable of contributing. In one way or another, I was trying to build a role for myself.
For a long time, I thought I had simply failed to figure it out. Maybe I had not defined myself clearly enough. Maybe I had not found the right language. Maybe I needed a better offer, a clearer title, a stronger pitch, or a different direction.
Meanwhile, the industry I had come from kept changing. The economy changed. Technology changed. Work changed. I changed. But in my mind, I was still measuring my relevance against the landscape I had left. I kept looking backward even when I thought I was looking forward, and every year that passed made me feel a little further away.
What I did not understand was that my experience had not suddenly become irrelevant. The container for it was changing.
Experience needs a container
We tend to talk about experience as if more of it automatically creates more opportunity. Sometimes it does. But experience also becomes more complex over time. The longer you work, the more you understand how things connect. You stop seeing only the individual pieces and start seeing the whole landscape.
You know what happens between departments. You know where systems break. You know which rules are essential and which ones are habits. You know where people get stuck. You know the path that looks easy on the map but becomes difficult once you are actually standing in the terrain.
That kind of experience can be incredibly valuable, but it can also be difficult to fit inside a conventional job description. Sometimes there is no current container built to hold the way your knowledge now works.
This is one of the difficulties of being overqualified. It is not only that you have too much experience for a particular job. It is that the roles available may no longer reflect the way your experience has evolved. That creates a strange gap. You know you can contribute. You may even see exactly where you could contribute. But if no one else can see the role, there is no obvious way in.
You cannot create a role in isolation
There is a lot of advice telling people to create their own role: reinvent yourself, build your own thing, make your own opportunity. Even I have given that advice, and I still believe there is truth in it. People do need to understand themselves, define what they want, and create opportunities where they can.
But we often leave out an important part of the story. You cannot simply declare a new role and expect the world to make room for it.
A role is relational. A company has to need it. A community has to respond to it. A problem has to require it. And in practical terms, someone usually has to be willing to pay money for it.
You can know yourself deeply, understand your strengths, decide what kind of work you want to do, and become very clear about what you are uniquely capable of contributing. That clarity matters, but it is only one side of the equation. The other side is need.
A role becomes real at the meeting point between who you have become and what the world is beginning to need. Sometimes that meeting point takes a long time to appear.
The in-between work is not wasted
This is where I have had to rethink the years that felt messy: the years when I did not have a clear title, when I was building things that did not obviously connect, and when I was writing, teaching, consulting, experimenting, hosting events, creating ideas, starting an online community, and trying to understand what all of it meant.
At the time, some of that work felt fragmented. Now I see it differently. Every one of those things reflected information back to me.
My writing showed me what people responded to. My community showed me where I was helpful. My events showed me what kinds of conversations I was good at creating. Teaching showed me where I had something meaningful to offer.
I have felt this through teaching for a long time. When I taught martial arts, I often felt that I received as much from my students as they received from me. Teaching was never one-directional. I gave something, they responded, and their response taught me something about myself.
The same thing is happening now. Every time I create something useful for someone else, I learn more about where my strengths are. I learn what resonates, what helps, what people return for, and what kind of contribution feels natural to me.
The in-between work has become a kind of laboratory. It gives me room to test, observe, create, and learn. It also gives other people a chance to see me differently.
You still may not recognize the opening
Even after doing all this work, an opportunity can appear and you may not recognize it.
When you have spent years measuring yourself against an old system, you tend to keep looking toward the places that used to validate you: familiar industries, familiar titles, familiar companies, familiar measures of success. Every time you do not see yourself reflected there, the fear of becoming irrelevant grows.
That frame can make it difficult to see where your experience is becoming useful in a different way. You think you need to get back. You think you need to recover your old relevance. You think you need to prove that you can still do what you used to do.
This is where other people can sometimes see around your blind spot before you can.
A colleague may see an application for your experience that you would never have considered. A friend may recognize that your skills translate into an entirely different environment. Someone who has already crossed from one industry into another may see a path you cannot yet see. The people you teach, serve, write for, or work alongside may recognize your strengths before you have language for them yourself.
That changes the purpose of a network. It is not only about who can help you get a job. It is also about who can help you see where your experience belongs now.
The role itself is relational, and finding the role can be relational too. Sometimes we need another person to reflect back a version of our experience that we have not yet learned to see.
So the question changes: Where is the world changing in a way that makes what I already know newly relevant? Where does my experience become useful differently?
Those questions require looking at the landscape as it is becoming, not only as it was.
Preparing for roles that do not exist yet
When my son was born, his father and I came across an idea that stayed with us: we needed to prepare our children for jobs that did not yet exist.
That created an obvious problem. How do you prepare someone for work you cannot name?
At the time, I thought of that mostly as a question about education and the future. Now I think it is a question for all of us.
We are watching familiar roles change, combine, disappear, and reappear in new forms. New industries are taking shape while old ones are being rebuilt from the inside. Some of the work ahead may not fit neatly into any role we would have known to search for a few years ago.
So the question becomes less about which existing job you are qualified for and more about how you prepare yourself to contribute to work that is still being defined.
That requires knowing yourself, staying in motion, paying attention to what people value in you, and remaining connected to people who can see possibilities you cannot yet see for yourself. It also requires enough practical stability to keep going while the answer is still forming.
Reinvention does not happen outside the realities of mortgages, healthcare, children, bills, and the rest of adult life. There is risk in the in-between, and there is uncertainty. There are no guarantees.
But there is also movement.
The next wave of work will need people who understand new technologies, new systems, and new ways of working. It will also need people with enough experience to bring judgment, context, pattern recognition, and perspective. Younger people will help shape what comes next. Experienced people will help shape it too. We will need both.
For those of us with years of experience behind us, the opportunity may be larger than finding our place in the next system. We may also have a responsibility to help shape what that system becomes.
The role may not exist yet.
But the need for someone like you may already be forming.