Suffering from "last name syndrome"

"Who am I?" (said in a Derek Zoolander voice)

As emo as it might sound, 2023 has been a year of soul-searching for me. I’ve written before about how I feel a bit adrift, trying to figure out how to move from one phase of my career to the next. I really miss the security blanket of having a fancy job title. Whenever I introduced myself as an executive editor at Fortune, it felt like people took me a little more seriously. I enjoyed the prestige that came with having a place toward the top of the masthead at a national publication.

Now it’s more complicated. When I first left Fortune, I really dreaded the question, What do you do? And one time I even said, “Nothing!” which is so far from the truth but seemed a whole lot easier than explaining that I’m in the middle of an existential career crisis. What do I do? Good question.

I’m trying hard not to take myself too seriously and get stuck in a total stress spiral. I often think about that scene in Zoolander where Derek, after losing the Male Model of the Year award to Hansel, stares at his reflection in a street puddle, and asks, “Who am I?” “I don’t know,” his reflection says back to him. Zoolander has a lot of things to ponder, and so do I.

I know it’s increasingly unpopular to be so hung up on job titles and climbing the career ladder and the like. A younger generation of women has absolutely destroyed the “Girl Boss” phenomenon that permeated the culture during my Refinery29 days. And I know I am more than a job title. I do get a lot of joy out of my other roles as friend, daughter, mother, wife. But I’m also ambitious, and I don’t think I should be ashamed of that. I want to feel good when I introduce myself to other people. And let’s be real, society isn’t the kindest to middle-aged mothers on career breaks. Maybe I’m not supposed to say that out loud, but oh well. You know everyone is thinking it.