The difference between leaving your job and being free.

I waited to feel like a different person. A few weeks in, I'm still discovering what that means...

I gave myself a gift after I decided to give it my all on my dreams. A trip to Japan — time off, no agenda, just space.

I thought if anything could reset me, it would be that. The markets, the slow mornings, the particular quiet of being somewhere that doesn’t know your job title or care about your LinkedIn headline. I’d been to Japan many times before and still yearning to go in the future... at this point it’s my second home.

I grew very familiar with the person I am when I set foot off the plane there. Even when I was travelling as a ‘tourist’, I distinctly recognised the way Japan slowed everything down, the way my shoulders dropped somewhere around the second day, and the way I started noticing things again.

The atmosphere of each hidden cafe. The texture of their ceramic cups. The gentle positioning of their carefully selected decor. The precise folding of a napkin. This time being back I thought I would feel something bigger. I thought I’d arrive back different.

But a few weeks in, everything still felt the same.

Not in a terrible way. Just a deeper layer of me. But still me. When I stood at a market in Kyoto at 7am watching a woman arrange persimmons one by one. Waiting to feel transformed, and slowly realising I’d brought all of myself with me. Every version. Every layer. The career, the identity, the particular shape of a person who spent eight years being useful. I’d packed all of it and carried it across twelve time zones.

I think I expected freedom to feel like becoming someone new. When in reality, it doesn’t. It feels like being left alone with who you already are.

Before I left, I thought the hardest part of a career change would be practical. The clients. The pipeline. The uncomfortable gap between what’s coming in and what’s going out. And those things are real. I won’t pretend the spreadsheet doesn’t exist. But they’re not the hardest thing of it all.

The hardest thing is how tightly you hold onto the version of yourself that your job built.

For eight years I was the person who knew what to do. Who managed the brief, ran the market, got things across the line and made sure to ship things on time.

I was introduced in meetings as “our APAC lead” and somewhere along the way I stopped noticing how much I’d started to live inside that sentence. The title wasn’t just a job. It was the answer to a question I didn’t know I’d been asking: am I worth something? The career was the proof. The ‘busy-ness’ was the evidence. I was always ‘busy.’ And if I was ‘busy’, it meant I existed, and therefore I mattered.

I’ve been reading a book called ‘Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra, and there’s an idea in it that’s been sitting with me for weeks. That when we leave a role, we don’t just lose a job. We lose a whole layer of self.

The reliable one. The useful one. The person people called when something needed doing. Layers and layers of identity we didn’t know we were wearing until we took them off and felt the cold.

Nobody tells you that the 9am call you resented was doing more than scheduling your morning. It was holding your whole sense of self in shape. The inbox, the meeting, the particular satisfaction of being needed. These aren’t just habits. They’re architecture. And when they go, the day isn’t just empty.

You are.

For months I kept looking for something to point at. Some proof that I still amounted to something without the title attached. I threw myself into my self-run e-commerce brand Namisan — the brand, the packaging, the positioning.

I took on multiple freelance briefs. I started this newsletter. All good things. All real. But I noticed something underneath all of it: I was building new costumes as fast as I’d taken the old one off. New answers to the same question. New ways to say: look, I’m still useful. Look, I still have somewhere to be.

The question underneath hadn’t changed. I’d just changed what I was wearing when I answered it.

Through it all I’m learning that this is the actual work. Not the freelance projects. Not the clients. Not building something new to replace the answer to “so what do you do?”

The actual work is figuring out who you are when nothing external is deciding for you.

When nobody’s scheduling your 9am or needing you in the room. When the proof has to come from somewhere inside instead. I don’t fully know how to do that yet. But on this journey, I’m learning how to.

Which is why I keep going back to Japan. Japan keeps showing me what it looks like from the outside. People who are just in the thing they’re doing — not pointing at it, not performing it, not waiting to feel like a better version of themselves once they’ve optimised enough. The woman with the persimmons wasn’t waiting to feel free. She wasn’t building a brand around persimmon selection or thinking about what it meant for her identity. She was just choosing a persimmon. Fully. Without needing it to mean more than it meant.

I’m not there yet.

But some mornings I get close. A slow drip coffee with cold foam at 6am, the light coming in flat and slow, no notifications, no proof required. Just me in the kitchen doing a small thing well. No title. No output. Just present in it. Those mornings feel like practice. Like something Im slowly learning to be instead of something Im trying to perform.

I’m starting to understand the difference. Leaving is a decision you make once. Freedom is something you build slowly, from the inside, after most of the architecture has come down and you’ve sat in the rubble long enough to figure out what you actually want to build next.

I’m getting there.

Thank you for reading and until next time.

— Katie xx