The Professional Mask
I let my job eat my personality, oops
When I started this Substack a few months ago, I was struck by how much my voice sounded like a corporate robot. This was upsetting because fifteen years ago I was a person who wrote a silly Yelp review about my favorite bus line:
after conferring with the passengers and trying a few other options, [the bus driver] managed to barely reach the magical light-changing button with someone's umbrella. Presto! Like a bizarrely patched-together machine, the lights turned, the bus turned, and in its usual unwieldy way it came within inches of the cliff, only to straighten out and creep up Clayton as if it were no big deal.
The 33-Stanyan: beautiful, death-defying, absurd. If you're lucky, you might one day bond with your driver and fellow passengers through a magical traffic button adventure. If you're extra lucky, you could be the person who feels like a superhero just for remembering to bring an umbrella that day.
I sucked all of the humanity from my writing by cultivating an objective, authoritative tone that would make people see me as a Competent Employee.
Holding Tension
I stand by my boring corporate comms voice, because this is in fact effective in the right environment. However, the inability to access my human person voice in a totally different context signaled a problem. Not a particularly unique problem—I’ve seen many operators and founders wobble on the authoritative vs. human tightrope—but something to address.
Writing a weekly Substack post forced me to sit in that discomfort and work through it. I’ve realized that I absorbed a lot of work stress that made it harder to be authentic—not just on the clock, but in general. The ubiquitous corporate comms voice was a symptom.
What’s Underneath
I’ve been working in cross-functional “glue” roles in fast-growing startups for over a decade: chief of staff, PMO leadership, org-level program management. These roles require the ability to hold many conflicting perspectives and find the best path forward in the face of what can be a lot of tension and conflict. The startup environment exacerbates the tension, because early-stage companies are constantly transforming. Growing a company is basically a never-ending exercise in change management.
At the same time, I’ve volunteered off and on for crisis hotlines. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people in situations that range from acute emergencies to “I just need someone to talk to so I can sleep.”
These roles are two sides of the same coin. The volunteer work, and associated trauma-informed training, has helped me navigate human-centered problems at work. My professional life has exposed me to bonkers levels of technical and business complexity, which has trained me to break down problems quickly.
I love this work and have a strong aptitude for it: I’m not cut out for roles where you do roughly the same thing over and over. I gravitate toward complex, impossible-sounding, human-centered problems, and have the tenacity (and now skill) to deliver in that environment. I’m never not going to take on that type of challenge.
That said: getting shit done in this context means cultivating trust, being very specific about messaging, setting difficult boundaries, and keeping a lot of underlying context confidential. All of that requires a lot of energy, which needs somewhere to go.
The Reset
I’ve found that it’s important to be able to speak my own truth somewhere and sublimate the feelings that come with it. Giving myself permission to voice the fear, anxiety, and rage that come along with, say, dealing with a (possibly) sociopathic colleague, means I can face the situation effectively.
My writing dilemma was a heads-up that I haven’t been properly tending to this very real human need. Several months of weekly writing, along with talk therapy, has helped me regain some lost authenticity. Moving forward, I'll watch for signs my work persona is taking over—not just for my sake, but for the people around me too.
What’s Next for Me
All of this reflection has helped me realize there may be a better use for my skills. I'm exploring a pivot that combines the complexity and transformation work I love with the kind of direct, unburdened conversation that actually gets to the root of things. More on that soon.