The Joy of Melding Your Work and Private Personas Into One Authentic Self

What do you feel you should be doing?

That was the question asked of me during a recruitment process six years ago by the company’s young and attractive life coach. Dressed to the nine and exuding a cool hipster vibe complete with an old-school pocket watch, he looked at me with earnest eyes that saw too much. Prior to this discussion, I had never even heard of a life coach, never mind speak to one. But the owner of the advertising start-up that wanted to hire me certainly did and even built in such a talk in the hiring process.

I was 25 at the time, slightly workaholic, eager to please and to prove my worth, and had never in a million years thought that someone would ask me this in a job interview. After all, what would they care about my feelings? My mind, my goals, my skill set, that was another matter altogether, but my feelings? What did they have to do with anything? I didn’t have an easy answer, nor did I understand the way that simple yet powerful question would one day change my life completely. Not at first and not for some years, but the seed had been sowed.

After two more rounds of standard HR discussions, they eventually hired me and I ended up staying there for two years. The work experience was valuable, with lots of know-how added to my self-doubt-ridden belt, but the most important gift it brought me was the serendipitous meeting with the therapist that had formed the hipster life coach. He must have seen some dormant quality in me because he arranged for an impromptu session. I will be forever grateful for his gentle push.

For a sensitive introvert like myself, whose closest companions were The Boy Who Lived, Prince Caspian, or Miss Elisabeth Bennet, even the fact that I agreed to it was momentous. Coming from a small, East-European country where therapy was often perceived as a marker of insanity, it was a bit of a gamble. But I had felt out of sorts my whole life, like an animal whose fur didn’t settle quite right. Or like an earth-bound eagle, with shadow wings.

The impromptu session turned into a beautiful work relationship of a different kind, where I battled and often conquered many demons. For once, the hostilities were not confined to the pages of fiction, but to snippets of my own reality. From the more common fear of flying and heights to my gargantuan lack of confidence and often crippling anxiety. The wonderful woman who week after week occupied the couch in front of me breathed fresh air into my parched lungs. Or better said, helped me realign the pipes again. At her prompting, I embarked on a journey of self-discovery worthy of the character arcs in my beloved books. I discovered parts of myself that I didn’t know were missing in the first place, obscured by society’s conditioning. A loss experienced but never explained. Slowly, the puzzle pieces started to resemble a tranquil Monet painting rather than a convoluted Picasso. Brick by brick, with sweat, blood, and tears a framework was being laid.

What do you feel you should be doing?

Despite my breakthroughs, this was the question on the edge of my consciousness, never properly addressed. Like the echo of a dream you can’t make out when morning comes. “What do you feel you should be doing?”

Years passed and the small start-up was replaced by an advertising corporation. Mad Men had glorified the industry so much, making audiences believe in the dream of Madison Avenue, in larger-than-life executives and three-martini lunches. But from my experience, if left unchecked, it could suck you dry and spit you out faster than Don Draper changed mistresses. Unfortunately for me, I did leave it unchecked for years, splitting my being in half: my work persona (always calm, collected, professional, unassuming, unobtrusive) and my private persona, which was the focus of my therapy sessions and self-reflection.

It was a poor strategy, creating two sides at war with each other. At home, I was the explorer in search of life’s fundamental questions, while at work this meek and awkward creature emerged, solely focused on the task at hand, always putting the clients’ needs before her own. So, while I battled my anxiety on one front, I inadvertently created the biggest dissonance of them all; an inner conflict that simmered for years, until it finally reached a boiling point.

The funny-not-funny part was that something continued to feel off, even after I’d started the inner explorations. A stirring desire on the wind, bemoaning things unknown. Perhaps a little similar to Sehnsucht, the nostalgic yearning of German construct C.S.Lewis described as “the inconsolable longing for what we know not what.” I wished for Aslan’s far-away country, without having any real notion of it. Just a haunting sense of incompleteness.

Time continued its passing, bringing along various wins, big and small. The greatest of them all being to reach a point of self-acceptance that enabled me to meet the co-tenant of my heart. The joy this brought me silenced the dissonance for a while, keeping it at bay some more.

Fast-forward one year and a half. My partner and I had just returned from our summer holiday, seven blissful days of fun in the sun, of togetherness. The night before going back to work, the rope finally snapped. The deluge couldn’t be stopped any longer. On its crushing waves came the tidal forces of unleashed dissonance. The conflict could not broker a truce anymore, it wanted, needed only peace. But how could I give it that when I had no tools? When I was so ill-equipped? In the middle of the raging storm, my partner threw me a lifeline, by calling my therapist. The same one who’d been beside me from that fateful day years ago. I hung to her every word, clinging to the gentle cadence of her voice, and pulled myself back to safety. A temporary island where my mind could function at some level.

After a sleepless night of near agony, I went to work. Dutiful once more, even on the brink of breaking. The puzzle pieces that I thought had slowly been arranging were blown to shards, my brain haywairing. A firework of madness, threatening to swallow me whole.

That evening, I visited my therapist for an urgent session and started crying as soon as I reached her office. Gut-wrenching, ugly sobs of despair and uncertainty in the face of the unknown fell heavy on my cheeks. I was back in the eye of the storm, no safe island in sight. But through it all, a tendril of brilliant light pierced the haze, a question from long ago.

What do you feel you should be doing?

At this, the mind quieted for a second; waiting, assessing. This was it; the turning point. My shirt was soaked with sweat and tears, my limbs deadweights pulling me down, crushing my very essence. I clenched my eyes shut and followed the thread. “What do you feel you should be doing?” What did I feel? At an instinctual level, I knew that the tornado must be related to work, but I didn’t understand what my feelings had to do with it. They belonged to a different home. “What do you feel you should be doing?” And the answer came with brutal force; an ax that couldn’t stay suspended a moment longer.

“Not this. I can’t do this anymore. This job is killing me inside.”

It was a beautiful, frightening, larger-than-life revelation.

You would think that it prompted an immediate letter of resignation. But this was not a movie. No, I didn’t resign on the spot but took a one-week medical leave to nurture the frayed edges of my mind. To come to terms with this decision that I knew was inexorable; inavoidable if I wished to step fully into the light and preserve who I was. What I was meant to be. However, it was not easy to relinquish life-long chains, even when I knew they were hurting me.

The week that followed was one of the hardest of my life. I felt fundamentally damaged, flawed, disappointed in myself, and betrayed by my own nature. I thought that I was doing so well. How could I face my loving but strict, conventional parents, for whom work was an officially acknowledged burden one just accepts as part of life? We were not living together anymore, but still, I loathed to let them down in any way.

The physician who signed my medical leave put in stomach flu, because panic attacks, anxiety, or burnout would have left a permanent mark on my medical record, available to all future employers to see. That was the society I lived in, one that buries wings and covers fish gills. How could I simply leave, just like that? With no prospects, nothing on the horizon; only uncertainty. Could I dare? “What do you feel you should be doing?” And resign I did. Because something finally clicked, an essential awareness that had eluded me until that point. I needed to explore it.

After deciding to take a big leap into the unknown and let go of my well-paid, secure job, I started an intense process of soul-searching; facilitated by my partner’s immediate and unconditional support. Merging mind, heart, and soul; thoughts, feelings, and instincts. It was a gruesome three months of labor to resurface my true self. Step by shaky step the real puzzle emerged. Or rather the correct foundation on which to build the rest of my life.

At last, I had clarity. We can’t separate our private persona from our work one. We’re a single entity, one person. Flawed, beautiful, and unique, the sum of all our patchwork parts. Every moment of every day we bring it all to the table, thorns and roses alike. We don’t have independent skillsets for each function, only different parts of the same us that we carry around the clock; features of the same model. Somewhere along the way, we’ve misinterpreted the saying “Don’t bring your work home with you.” It should rather be “Don’t let work interfere with your personal life” or “Don’t bring your work troubles home”. But not your work self. That’s a recipe for insanity. We’re not meant to live a double life. For most people, work doesn’t define who they are and that is fine. Each person has their own arc in the great narrative of life. The vital takeaway is to be whole and do whatever works for you.

Easier said than done? Naturally, but not impossible. How? By exploring every facet of our beings. Use them to our advantage, in the pursuit of happiness. We can’t be one person at home and another at work, willingly accepting a life of misery from 9 to 5 and start living in our free time. Time may be relative, but it’s not endless. We need to meld the two personas, to bridge the gap, to stop the dissonance. Then and only then we’ll be able to live a real and rounded existence, true to our authentic being; free of self-imposed constraints. Make no mistake, there is always a choice. Whatever society throws at us, we have the final say. To keep our heads down and accept what comes our way or find a different path; maybe even forge our own. Authenticity should never be off-limits. Even the business world started to support my hard-won revelation, evidenced in the latest “Bring your whole self to work” trend.

In this time of intense exploration, I rediscovered my long-stifled passion for writing; the joy of creating brave, new worlds. And even though I eventually accepted an offer from a much different and more inclusive advertising firm, writing became an integral part of my identity. While the globe came to terms with the initial lockdown in March 2020, I wrote a book. A spiritual urban fantasy about a young woman whose journey of self-discovery changed the world. Go figure.

My work persona and my private one are finally melded in a beautiful tapestry of authenticity. And now that the creative gates have been opened, a plethora of words, ideas, possibilities pour out, unrestrained. Because this is who I am and that’s okay.

What do you feel you should be doing?

For me, the answer is finally clear. To write everything and anything the muses whisper in my ears, in an in-between of creation.

What’s yours?

By A.M. Radulescu

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