I'm no longer a marketer
When twenty years of career identity dissolves not through crisis but completion, what remains is fertile nothing—and no idea what comes next.
I built brands from nothing and executed strategies like alchemy. Marketing wasn’t just what I did for twenty years, it was the shape I took in the world. And somewhere in this last year, I realized I wasn’t a marketer anymore, and more surprisingly, I didn’t want to be. My identification with the role of “marketing strategist and analyst” simply stopped, the way a fever breaks in the middle of the night.
Except fevers don't actually break clean. You don't notice the temperature dropping degree by degree — you only notice when you wake up cool and realize the heat left sometime while you were sleeping.
The leaving was mental, years of it, non-linear and unmarked by any external event. I didn't quit marketing. I just stopped being a marketer somewhere in the mess of becoming something else. I have work now, my biggest role ever, but I also know it will be my last rodeo in this form. Everything I’ve learned in my career is being applied something I actually believe in — regenerative business, living systems, all lives in balance.
