If It Doesn't Look Like a Job, Does It Count?
A friend of mine (she’s a PA in finance by day and a makeup artist on the side) decided to take a month off between contracts. No scrambling for interviews, no next role lined up. Just space. Rest. A reset.
The reactions came quickly. "So what's the plan?" "Wait — you're just not working?"
Freedom, it turns out, makes people uncomfortable. Especially when it disrupts the script.
The script most of us are handed goes roughly like this: get the good job, marry the partner, buy the house, work hard, be sensible, stay safe. Many of us follow it. We do what we're told will lead to fulfilment and then find ourselves somewhere along the way feeling stuck in lives we built carefully but no longer quite want to live in.
It's not just burnout. It's a kind of emotional claustrophobia… the slow realisation that ticking the boxes hasn't led to the freedom you were promised.
When a man leaves a corporate job to launch something new, he tends to be called bold. Visionary. When a woman does the same, people ask if she's sure. They wonder when she'll go back. They assume something went wrong.
That's not just perception: the Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship found women are significantly more likely than men to cite fear of failure as a barrier to starting a business. We're encouraged to be reliable, modest, risk-averse. To trade freedom for security, even when the security is the thing that's suffocating us.
And when you step away from the script, people notice and they’re not always kind about it. What I've come to understand is that people tend to react to change through the lens of their own fears. When you choose pause or uncertainty or a quieter kind of ambition, it can unsettle something in the people around you. That discomfort is theirs to carry, not yours.
To give High Flying Design my full-time attention, I left a stable, well-paying director-level role in marketing and operations. It was a job people work years to land. On paper, it made sense to stay.
What I didn't expect was how much I'd need to unlearn.
Like a lot of women I know, I felt I needed a bridge job… freelance work to make it look like I hadn't really left. Something to prove I was still productive. Still responsible. Still earning the right to call myself a professional.
Because somewhere underneath that was a belief I hadn't quite named yet: if it doesn't look like a job, it doesn't count.
The truth is, I'd already built something that mattered. A magazine. A platform. A space for women growing businesses in their own way. What I hadn't built yet was the trust in myself to let that be enough.
William Bridges, who spent decades researching career transitions, describes this as transition identity detachment… a kind of grief process. You're letting go of the version of yourself who was rewarded for being endlessly reliable, endlessly available, endlessly on. It isn't a breakdown. It's a recalibration.
Success doesn't always look like a title or a paycheck. Sometimes it looks like peace. A slow build instead of a sprint. Purpose instead of pressure. The ability to work in a way that doesn't drain you by Tuesday.
If you're somewhere in the in-between right now (the pause between what was and what's coming) you don't need a new title to be doing something real. You don't need full-time income to deserve space. You don't need to explain yourself to people whose script you've decided to put down.
The people who question your choices are almost never the ones who end up being proved right.
The path that isn't linear isn't less valid. It's just written in your own handwriting, and that's a truer kind of success than any role or salary could confirm.