Is A CALLING THE SAME AS A ROLE

July 13, 2026

I’ve been thinking about a question I asked Warren.

Is a calling the same as a role?

He didn’t answer right away.

Or maybe he did, and I wasn’t ready to hear it.

What I do know is how quickly I still reach for evidence.

Even now, I feel the urge to tell you about the promotions. The performance reviews. The graduate degree. The thesis. As though I still need to prove I earned the right to ask the question.

Maybe that’s what happens when you’ve spent months defending your own story.

Maybe that’s what institutions teach us.

That our value lives in documentation.

For most of my life, I believed a role was the highest expression of a calling.

I don’t judge that younger version of me.

She worked incredibly hard.

In my thirties, while working full time and raising three young children, I completed graduate school. I deliberately chose a program with a thesis because I wanted the option of pursuing a PhD. I wrote on corporate social responsibility because I believed business and philanthropy belonged in the same conversation.

Looking back, I realize that choice says more about me than the degree itself.

Even then, I wasn’t fascinated by business.

I was fascinated by people.

By ethics.

By responsibility.

By asking how systems could better serve the people inside them.

The work I loved wasn’t administrative.

It was imagining.

Building culture.

Writing.

Seeing patterns.

Asking uncomfortable questions.

The spreadsheets never did.

Neither did the politics.

Or governance battles.

Or watching institutions protect themselves while convincing everyone they were protecting something else.

For years I assumed I simply hadn’t found the right organization.

Now I wonder if I was asking the wrong question.

Maybe I was trying to express something through a role that could never fully contain it.

That doesn’t erase the grief.

There is a profound difference between deciding to leave a career and having it taken from you.

I didn’t choose the ending.

I was threatened, targeted, worn down and ultimately removed.

Grief asks different questions when the ending isn’t yours to write.

Distance asks different questions too.

When you’re immersed in a role, urgency becomes your normal. Everything feels important because everything arrives at once.

Then, slowly, the noise begins to fade.

Not enough to forget.

Just enough to hear yourself think again.

I miss the people.

I miss building.

I miss watching someone discover they were capable of more than they believed.

I don’t miss carrying systems that refused to carry themselves.

It’s also about realizing how much of myself I gave to things that could never love me back.

When I look backwards now, the signs were never really about leadership.

They were about making.

I’ve spent my whole life arranging things.

Sometimes it was colour.

Sometimes it was words.

Sometimes it was people.

Sometimes it was ideas.

Even the way I dressed wasn’t conventional. I was always pulling together colour and interest in combinations that made sense to me before they made sense to anyone else.

I wasn’t getting dressed.

I was composing.

Bodybuilding wasn’t simply about muscle.

It was shape.

Proportion.

Presentation.

Writing wasn’t reporting.

It was making sense of the world.

Leadership wasn’t management.

It was imagining a different future and convincing people it was possible.

Painting didn’t create something new.

It exposed something old.

Lately, I’ve noticed something else.

The face tattoo I love.

The oversized black glasses I reach for every morning.

Paint under my fingernails.

A studio filled with canvases leaning against the walls.

None of them feel like costumes.

They feel like recognition.

Warren has called me extravagant for years.

I used to think he meant my clothes.

Now I wonder if he meant something else entirely.

Not extravagance as excess.

Extravagance as a life that keeps spilling past the edges of whatever is supposed to contain it.

Maybe that’s what he’s been seeing all along.

I’ve never experienced perspective as permanent.

Skills aren’t fixed.

Identity isn’t fixed.

Experiences don’t stay inside the chapter where they happened.

They migrate.

Graduate school still shapes how I think.

Leadership still shapes how I understand people.

Bodybuilding still shapes how I understand discipline, proportion and presentation.

Motherhood still shapes my patience, my grief and the way I love.

Art hasn’t replaced any of them.

It has become the place where they meet.

Perhaps that’s why institutions and I were always in tension.

Institutions depend on consistency.

Hierarchy.

Predictability.

I’ve always been more interested in possibility.

For years I thought the answer was learning how to fit better.

Now I wonder if I spent decades trying to make myself smaller so the container would feel comfortable.

That thought has led me somewhere unexpected.

Did Warren always see this?

Was he simply waiting for me to catch up?

And what about my family?

Did they quietly carry the cost of all the hours I kept giving away?

The evenings.

The weekends.

The phone calls that interrupted dinner.

The emotional energy I carried home after spending all day holding everyone else together.

Was I so committed to saving struggling systems that I couldn’t see how much of me those systems were borrowing from the people I loved?

…

I don’t know.

Maybe there isn’t an answer.

Maybe the value is finally being willing to live inside the question.

The older I get, the less interested I am in dividing my life into chapters that replace one another.

We call things crises.

Career crisis.

Midlife crisis.

Identity crisis.

Maybe that’s the only language we’ve been given.

Mine has become more fluid.

Life is finite.

Experiences are not.

They don’t disappear because the context changes.

They travel with us.

Perspective evolves.

Skills migrate.

What once looked like preparation often reveals itself years later as foundation.

Which brings me back to where I started.

Do we actually have a specific calling?

Or have we mistaken occupations for callings because occupations are easier to explain?

If my calling was to be a CEO, then losing that role means losing the thing I was meant to become.

That feels too fragile.

Too dependent on a title.

But if my calling is something deeper…

To make.

To notice.

To question.

To connect ideas that don’t appear to belong together.

To imagine possibilities before evidence exists.

Then perhaps every chapter has been another expression of the same instinct.

Graduate school wasn’t preparation for a title.

Leadership wasn’t preparation for an organization.

Art didn’t replace either of them.

It became another medium through which the same calling could speak.

Not that I lost who I was.

That I mistook where she lived.

For years I believed these were separate identities.

CEO.

Writer.

Artist.

Athlete.

Mother.

Now they feel less like identities than mediums.

Different ways the same person has always made sense of the world.

I don’t think I became an artist.

I think I finally named what had always been there.

The role changed.

The calling never did.