Renowned French-American diarist and essayist, Anaïs Nin, said,
“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
When I first learnt about Type A personalities at an Organizational Behaviour course in college, I thought that was absolutely me. Intense, competitive, highly organized, ambitious, impatient, always “on”. I was proud of it too and sought out opportunities and people that were like me. However, I missed the subtext – that Type A’s are very prone to burnout (also heart troubles but that’s not the point of this post). My burnout came slowly with successive and quick transitions
In 2020, I moved on from a steady corporate job, a defined identity, all left behind, in pursuit of building something uncertain and exciting. I thought I did everything to control how I experienced this journey – I joined a well-reputed talent incubator, met some incredible people I call friends, and then waited for an epiphany to hit, a lightning to strike, and electricity to pulsate through me. It didn’t. And when it didn’t, I brushed it off with the narrative that “of course, all founders fail”. I did not recognize that I was walking straight into a fog of doubt.
And that fog has stayed for quite a while.
It didn’t help that I was also navigating other transitions – into motherhood which in itself is the toughest transition for any human, into asking for help after a lifetime of being fiercely independent, into not getting that “salary credited” SMS ping on my phone. These are the kinds of things no one talks about enough – how much they shake your sense of self, how they mess with your inner voice. And strangely enough, in hindsight, I was like a frog in boiling water; not realizing that so many changes were happening to me – the letting go of old identities, the slow reckoning with change, the reshaping of ambition, the redefinition of self. And all the while I was trying to keep it together and to preserve the intensity of being a Type A.
But here’s the annoying thing about being a Type A, and being around Type A’s. You want to be the best parent, the best homemaker, and the best friend. The pace is relentless and experimentation? Pshaw. I HAD to get things right before I even began. It became a vicious cycle. I had to get things right before I began for which I needed to get started. I needed to get started for which I had to get things right before I began. And so on. And I always had a good reason – not enough clarity, not the right timing, too many voices in my head, not ambitious enough, my heart is just not in this. Over time the inaction from hesitation, overthinking, second-guessing got me into a state of fear. And not the panic kind, rather a slow erosion of confidence that made it hard to begin, let alone build. I found myself tightening. Withdrawing. Rethinking and even regretting every idea, every ambition. I was “triggered” at friends talking about work challenges and successes. This fear became a kind of silence.
All these negative emotions sparked off an identity crisis. Am I really good at anything? What is this great potential people can see in me? Can I really build something of my own? Was that version of me that was fiercely ambitious just… gone? If AI can do anything, is there really a point of me trying? Can moms really have it all? Can I recover from this?