I'm no longer a marketer
When twenty years of career identity dissolves not through crisis but completion, what remains is fertile nothing—and no idea what comes next.
I built brands from nothing and executed strategies like alchemy. Marketing wasn’t just what I did for twenty years, it was the shape I took in the world. And somewhere in this last year, I realized I wasn’t a marketer anymore, and more surprisingly, I didn’t want to be. My identification with the role of “marketing strategist and analyst” simply stopped, the way a fever breaks in the middle of the night.
Except fevers don't actually break clean. You don't notice the temperature dropping degree by degree — you only notice when you wake up cool and realize the heat left sometime while you were sleeping.
The leaving was mental, years of it, non-linear and unmarked by any external event. I didn't quit marketing. I just stopped being a marketer somewhere in the mess of becoming something else. I have work now, my biggest role ever, but I also know it will be my last rodeo in this form. Everything I’ve learned in my career is being applied something I actually believe in — regenerative business, living systems, all lives in balance.
My boss, in the current role I serve in, asked me, “How long do I have you?” And my response was, “Until the work is done. But once it’s done, I’m gone.” There’s a finality in that release, and it leaves massive space for what I may want to do next.
And while most people would push into exploration of what’s next, I’ve decided to take the approach I’ve taken in 2025, and carry it over into 2026. I’m going to allow things to present themselves, then I take action, not before.
By not trying to force what comes next, I find ideas free flowing in my head and my general energy rising. Even new books found me in used book store Helena. You know, one of the old places that time has forgot, filled with editions that never made a bestseller list, but somehow, are better than anything you could found on Amazon.
Current, on my bedside table sits Jung and Astrology and The Regenerative Life, texts that feed my long love of behavior, the architecture of the mind, and how we become who we become.
Career is identity in American culture — maybe the primary one for those of us who built selves around competence. When that dissolves through completion or failure, what remains is fertile nothing, a space that wants to gestate rather than be immediately filled.
I don’t know what I’ll call myself next, and I don’t need to know right now. It’ll reveal itself over time, through sitting with ideas, letting them flow onto paper, through allowance.
Have you been here? Between who you were and who you haven’t yet become?