13 Nov 2025 3 min read Reinvention

From Corporate Office to Creator: The Math of Reinvention

"Do something else!"

The earliest stage of reinvention remains the toughest.

It’s where releasing and letting go must happen.

This part is hard. Kissing a ten, fifteen, or twenty-year marriage goodbye isn’t easy. The same can be said for careers and many other things.

Those longstanding things become foundational to our identities.

For 20 years, I was a marketing and sales professional at a pharmaceutical distributor, a SaaS company, and multiple accounting and consulting firms.

My career took me from New York to Maryland, to California, then back to Maryland. My career brought nice cars, two different houses, including one I’m still paying for, and trips to places like Hawaii and Florence, Italy.

Then one day last year, the unexpected end arrives, and next thing I know I'm spending days endlessly searching job boards and checking LinkedIn hourly, expecting something to change.

It’s the ultimate mindfuck.

Over the last 12 months, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve thought about deleting my LinkedIn account. It’s been chronicling my work accomplishments since moving to Oakland, California, in February 2008 for a marketing role at McKesson Corporation.

Today, it’s the ultimate symbol of what I’ve done in the past.

I’m proud of all that I’ve done in the past as a marketer, but on the inside, I feel more like a writer than a marketer. I made more than $2 million over my career as a marketer. In the last 14 months as a Medium writer, my total earnings $2.98.

That doesn’t exactly make me want to pop my collar and pound my chest. It makes me think hard about the wisdom of letting go of what I’ve known.

So, my LinkedIn profile remains.

Still, everything I’ve done over the last year, from writing on Medium to launching a newsletter on Ghost a few months ago with a YouTube channel and TikTok handle to begin the process of building Ink & Audible into an online publication, has me thrilled and excited like I haven’t been in way too long.

Making Space for Who You're Meant to Become

Where I am is where a lot of others are.

Struggling to let go of old identities to make enough room for a new identity.

The new identities we want, the reinvention we crave, cannot really take root and grow like a newly planted tree until we stop scattering our seeds across the good soil and get down on our knees to bury them with our bare hands.

My mom, the same mom who I tried to keep in the dark about my employment struggles for three months before the truth made it to the light around this time last year, left me with three simple words.