Real Talk | From Paycheque to Purpose

Let me tell you something about waking up at 40 and realizing you’ve built a career that pays the bills but starves your soul: it’s not a graceful epiphany. It’s not some champagne-sipping, mood-board-inspiring moment. It’s a quiet, chest-tightening kind of grief. The kind that sits in your throat while you're in another Zoom call with people who still think “circle back” is a personality.

I used to think I’d made it. Good title. Decent salary. Benefits. I could afford the nice shampoo and take spontaneous long weekends without checking my overdraft. But somewhere between the endless zoom meetings and the polite nodding, I lost the plot. I became a woman who built a life she didn’t actually want to live.

I was working to prove something I no longer believed in.

You know what no one warns you about? How success can trap you just as much as failure. The higher I climbed, the more I realized I was scaling a ladder leaned against the wrong damn wall. I was exhausted, not from the work itself, but from the effort it took to pretend I cared.

The real pivot didn’t come with a dramatic exit or a viral resignation letter. It came in a whisper. A thought I’d shoved down for years: I want something more real. More mine.

So, I left. Not all at once. I side-hustled my way into storytelling, communications, advocacy—work that spoke to my actual life, not my LinkedIn profile. I took freelance jobs that felt terrifyingly small at first, and I stopped introducing myself with a title like it was a trophy.

Was it scary? Hell yes. There were moments I felt like a fool, stepping away from stability at an age when people are clinging to it like a life raft. But here’s the thing—what I do now? It feeds me. It feels like truth. I no longer leave parts of myself in the parking lot just to collect a paycheque.

And maybe this is the real flex of being 40: giving up the performance. Saying, I want to do work that doesn’t kill my joy. Saying, I want to be proud of my days again.

Now, I wake up and pour my coffee with a sense of rebellion—because I built this. Not for applause, not for optics. For me.

And you know what? That’s the kind of success I can finally breathe in.

~smy