When I was pregnant with my second child, I had to quit my job.
It wasn’t a choice I would have made on my own. The pregnancy needed me to slow down, and my health and the baby came first, so I stepped away. What I didn’t expect was the grief that came after.
It didn’t come all at once. It came in bouts. I’d be folding laundry or waiting at school pickup, and a question would show up out of nowhere: who am I now?
For most of my adult life I had an answer ready. I had a career, work I was good at, people who relied on me. When someone at a party asked “what do you do?”, I knew what to say. Now when I tried to answer, all I could come up with was other people. I am someone’s daughter. Someone’s wife. Someone’s mother.
All true, and I’m grateful for every one of them. But each one describes me in relation to somebody else. So what am I on my own? And what am I worth if nobody is handing me a paycheck, a promotion, or a performance review?
If you’ve ever stepped away from a career, for your kids, for a parent, for your health, or because life decided for you, you probably know this feeling. It’s lonely, because from the outside your life looks fine. (I wrote about that gap years ago, in a piece about envy. Some lessons I clearly had to learn twice!)
Looking back, my problem was the lens. I was looking at my life through a microscope. Under a microscope, small things become huge. A comment from a relative. A LinkedIn update from a former colleague. A day where I did nothing “productive.” Each one filled the whole frame.
What I had to learn was to zoom out. From far enough back, a few years without a job title is a tiny dot on a long life, and the life itself is part of something much bigger than my resume.
The Bhagavad Gita says this better than I can. Krishna tells Arjuna:
na jāyate mriyate vā kadācin (2.20)
The soul is never born and never dies. It is unborn, eternal, ancient, and it is not destroyed when the body is.
If the real me was never born and will never die, then it was never “an employee.” It isn’t even “a mother.” Those are roles I’m playing in this life, and I want to play them well. But they are the costume, not the person wearing it.
The hardest part for me to put into words is this. Every now and then I get what I can only call a vision, a moment of complete clarity. I’ll write about these separately, but the message is always the same: life is not meant for attention or for acceptance from others. It’s meant for your own.
Most of us spent decades measuring ourselves by other people’s reactions. Grades, then salaries, then likes. When those reactions stop, it feels like we’ve stopped counting. Krishna’s most famous verse speaks right to this:
karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana (2.47)
You have a right to your actions, but never to their fruits. Don’t let the fruit be your motive, and don’t cling to doing nothing either.
Praise is a fruit. So is a title, a raise, a nice word at a family gathering. Do your work, whatever your work is right now (raising kids, caring for parents, healing, building something nobody sees yet), and let the fruits go.
Another verse helped me stop comparing:
śreyān sva-dharmo viguṇaḥ para-dharmāt sv-anuṣṭhitāt (3.35)
It is better to follow your own path imperfectly than someone else’s path perfectly.
My friends who kept climbing at work are walking their path. I’m walking mine. Walking mine clumsily is still better than copying theirs flawlessly. Don’t you agree?
And the verse I come back to most:
uddhared ātmanātmānaṁ nātmānam avasādayet
ātmaiva hy ātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ (6.5)
Lift yourself up by your own self. Don’t drag yourself down. You are your own best friend, and you are your own worst enemy.
Nobody else can give you self-worth. Not your husband, not your kids, not your boss, not your followers. They can love you, and I hope they do, but worth is something you hand yourself. The same mind that kept me up at night asking “who am I?” is the one that can answer “I am enough.”
I’m at a place of acceptance now. Not resignation, acceptance. I still have days when the old questions knock. The difference is that I don’t invite them to stay. (Some of you will remember my old roommate. She visits a lot less these days.)
A few things helped me get here, and I’ll write about each of them soon. One was sitting down with my own astrological chart and seeing my life laid out at a much bigger scale. Another is those visions. Both deserve their own posts.
For now, the seed I want to plant is simple. Stand tall in your own eyes. If you can do that, nothing else matters.