The Career Goal Is Control

How I've evolved professionally has been a culmination of the choices I've made or simply agreed to. Often, our environments, access and exposure help define the direction we take in life. The spaces I chose to stay in or engage further, both right and wrong, have contributed to my foundation and all that I have learned and continue to build on. There was a time when a certain prefix or title determined the boundaries of what "growth" was allowed to mean for me. A higher place on the org chart decided what came next, and in what order. The work was mine, but I didn't control the story being told about it.

I didn't understand that distinction clearly until I was building something of my own, and I realized how much of my hesitation had little to do with the plan and more to do with who was fully in charge of the narrative. Corporate life is very good at making stability feel like the only responsible choice. It rewards you for staying inside a story that was written before you arrived. It rarely encourages you to ask whether the reward is worth giving up the right to write something different.

What looked like delay was fear of over-exposure and failing somewhere visible. With no machine left to hide behind, leaving meant designing the next chapter in public, without the guarantees I had grown used to.

That fear never fully left. What shifted was my understanding of what I was really after and who truly contributes to writing this story.

A "career" doesn't have to be one continuous chapter to count. Mine wasn't. Every path I followed taught me something the last one couldn't, and none of them were a detour from the "real" story. An attorney who becomes a chef later hasn't wasted the law degree. She's just decided who's writing the next chapter, and it isn't the version of her that made partner.

Retirement gets treated like the one ending every professional journey is supposed to arrive at, on a fixed schedule. I don't think that holds for most women I know. There isn't always one finish line. Often it's just the first time she gets to choose, on her own timing, which chapter closes next.

“Say it plainly: the goal was authorship — deciding who writes this story, and what the next chapter says.”