The owner was 75 years old and had founded the company around thirty years earlier. Even though she had involved her children in the business, she never truly handed over control. Everything had to remain under her supervision - every document, every phone call, every detail.
People often asked her whether she planned to retire, and she would smile and reply that everyone in her family lived a long life and that she was not planning to go “anywhere” anytime soon. Although she was officially retired, she still came to work every single day.
When I think about her, I always think about how much of her identity was woven into that company. Even though she had grown children, this was her favorite child. Whenever the subject of leaving came up, she would answer with a smile and jokes like, “You’ll be seeing me for a long time yet.” But despite the smile, I could always sense a certain discomfort in her whenever that question was mentioned. One day, the two of us were alone, and her honest answer completely caught me off guard. She wasn’t retiring because she didn’t know what she would do without work. And besides that, the friends she knew who had retired had died. Somehow, her entire identity had become embedded in that company. She no longer knew who she was without it.
And that is terrifying. But also understandable. That feeling is familiar to me. When you close a long chapter of your life and suddenly find yourself standing at the very beginning again, one question always appears: who am I now? It is normal to question yourself. Normal to feel fear, hope, uncertainty. It is difficult to be completely honest with yourself, because once you are, you have to do something about it. You have to admit that you became addicted to movement, to being needed by others.
But the truth is, you need them far more, because they became your proof that you matter. And you are worth far more than that. You just do not always see it, because our mirrors are often distorted by windows into the past and the future, while rarely remaining here, in the present moment. And the problem with mirrors is that we almost always hold them at the wrong angle. We look into the past and see who we used to be. We look into the future and see who we think we should become. And in all that looking, we miss the only question that truly changes anything: who am I now, here, in this moment?
In the business world, what she was going through even has an official name - Founder's Syndrome. It is the moment when a person becomes so fused with their work that they no longer know where the business ends and where they begin. When a company becomes the only proof of your existence, leaving it does not feel like retirement. It feels like an amputation.
But watching her made me realize that we do not need to own large companies or build business empires to suffer from this syndrome. All of us have our own small, invisible kingdoms where we became trapped. It happens the moment we stay too long in the same place, the same role, or the same story we have been telling ourselves for years. Whether it is a job we spent decades doing, a relationship that stopped fulfilling us long ago, or simply the role of “the person who always fixes everything and never asks for help”, we eventually merge with that cage.
We begin to believe that we are that job, that title, that particular struggle. And then the same quiet terror I saw in her eyes appears within us too. The question: “If I step outside of this, who exactly walks out? What remains of me once this role is gone?” That is why people so often choose to remain stuck. We choose familiar unrest over unfamiliar peace, because we are afraid that without the heavy burden we carry, we might actually be nobody.
But nobody is not an empty space. Nobody is the place from which you can begin again. And maybe that silence, that emptiness, that uncertainty of not knowing who you are without the role you carried for so long, is actually the only place where you can finally begin to become yourself.
Like a blank white canvas - still, untouched, and ready. Yours.
#SelfDiscovery #IdentityCrisis #FoundersSyndrome #LifeTransitions #NewBeginnings #PersonalGrowth #LettingGo #Mindfulness
#SelfWorth #MentalHealthAwareness #CareerIdentity
#HumanPsychology #Leadership