Getting Lost and Reintroducing Yourself

How looking for a job and how it changes you

When you’ve been job searching for a while, something strange starts to happen. You begin to forget who you are. Not in a dramatic, identity-crisis kind of way. More like a quiet unraveling. A slow erasure. You send off enough applications, tweak enough resumes, sit through enough interviews that lead nowhere, and at some point, the version of yourself you’re presenting starts to feel less and less like the one you recognize. The farther you get away from your previous job, what cemented you in who you were as a marketer, can start to get lost a little.

At first, you think you’re just being smart about the process. Strategic. You’re tailoring things. You’re saying what you think they want to hear. You’re adjusting your tone, adjusting your framing, adjusting your expectations. It’s subtle at first. A new headline. A stripped-back resume. A tighter, more concise version of your story. You get good at performing clarity, even if deep down, you’re feeling anything but.

But as you go through the process, what you care about changes too. Maybe what you’re looking for day 1 is different then day 30. Or maybe as you interview, you start to find other places and skills you find much more interesting.

There’s a lot of weird things that happen as part of long job searches. They can flatten you. Shrink you down into keywords and summaries and digestible little blurbs that are optimized to not scare anyone off. And while some of that’s necessary, I get it, I’ve done it too, it’s easy to lose track of the version of yourself that existed before the job hunt began. The one who wasn’t exhausted. The one who was excited about something. The one who had opinions. Energy. Direction. A point of view.

I’ve caught myself going back through old work, things I was proud of, and feeling a little distance from it. Not because I no longer cared about the work, but because I couldn’t quite remember being that version of myself. The one who led the project. The one who spoke confidently. The one who was trusted. That distance, over time, can make you doubt things you used to know for sure. And when you’re already emotionally frayed from rejection, silence, or just the grind of looking, those doubts start to multiply.

So this newsletter isn’t for a hiring manager. It’s not for a recruiter. It’s not for a resume scanner or a future boss.

It’s for you.