Three Hours
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My first day in a new job is etched in my mind like it was yesterday. I’d gone into the interview determined to find something that got me feeling like me again, and for once there was no pretending. I spoke straight from the heart about what made me come alive, and they offered me the job. Finally, I was being recruited for being me.
I walked in full of beans. By dinner time, I could almost hear the door slam shut.
It started with what I thought was a simple question. There was a meeting that afternoon, and the date, time and venue were all there, but nobody had said what it was for. I’ve always believed that if you don’t know why you’re going to a meeting, how on earth can you know what’s expected of you? So I asked. “What’s the purpose of the meeting?”
Silence.
Not the useful kind. The cold kind, the kind that makes your skin crawl and your insides churn. So I tried again, a bit differently. “I mean, what’s expected of me? Should I introduce myself, take notes, give feedback, agree actions, or just sit there looking pretty?” I didn’t say that last bit out loud, but believe me, my inner voice was screaming it.
More silence. Then, in a very stern voice, I was told to just follow the plan and go.
I rang Pat on my dinner break, proper deflated. He couldn’t get his head round it. “Why didn’t you say something?” This was someone who’d held her own with clinicians and executives for years, and here I was just taking it in a small office. I tried to explain that something deep down was telling me not to go there, but the words got stuck in my throat.
Three hours. That’s all it took.
Three hours to slip right back into the person from my old job. The one who did what she was told, in the way of the script. The one who didn’t want to question anything or be labelled the gobby one. The one who dialled down her Northern accent. The one who could still hear “work hard and keep your head down” from when she was a kid. I thought I’d outgrown her. Turns out she’d just been waiting.
Pat was working away at the time and only home at weekends, so in the week it was me and the boys. I started every day as Mum Me, alive and messy and real, packing lunches and hunting for PE kit. Then I’d walk into that building and Work Me took over. Airbrushed, smoothed out, and dying inside. Eight hours of plastering on a smile. Then at home time the boys would jump in the back of the car, and Mum Me came back for football training and daft alphabet games all the way there.
People used to ask me how on earth I managed it all. I’d shrug and make a joke about chocolate and caffeine. The truth was, if I kept moving, kept busy, kept focused on the next drop-off and the next deadline, maybe I wouldn’t have time to notice the pain underneath.
And the meetings. Normally I could talk the hind legs off a donkey, but in that place I’d sit there nodding along like one of those daft bobblehead dogs people put in the back of their cars. My head going up and down, and my heart nowhere near the room. All the while my inner voice was having an absolute field day. Just smile and wave, girl, smile and wave. Will someone please just say something? Does anyone else see the madness here, or is it just me? And the should always won.
I was turning up every single day. I wasn’t showing up. There’s a difference, and it’s a big one.
The best way I can describe what was happening is those Russian dolls, the wooden ones that fit inside each other. The smallest doll is the real you. Every time I nodded when I didn’t agree, swallowed a question or put the smile on, it was like adding another doll over the top. Do it once and it’s easy enough to take the outer one off again. Do it every day, and the layers keep coming, and the real you ends up buried deeper and deeper inside.
It was a game of hide and seek. Only this time I wasn’t hiding in the woods with my mates. I was hiding from myself. And the longer I played, the harder it got to find my way back.
The worst bit was that I knew exactly what I was doing. I’d been here before, in my early career, and I’d sworn I’d never do it again. This time I could see myself disappearing in real time. I could feel it in my jaw, in my shoulders, in the headaches that turned up like clockwork in certain meetings and the Sunday nights when my mind wouldn’t shut up.
I couldn’t change that place, and I wasn’t going to win the fight. But I remembered something my Dad used to say. “It’s either important, or it’s not. You choose.”
So I chose. If I couldn’t be me out there, I’d be me in here. I took my lunch breaks back. Thirty minutes a day, outside, away from all of it. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. Time to breathe, to think, to remember who I was underneath all those dolls. It was me deciding I was important enough to claim a small part of my day for myself.
That’s where it started. Not with a big brave exit. With thirty minutes and a decision that I mattered.
Dimming your light doesn’t mean it’s gone out. Sometimes it’s just waiting for the right moment to shine softly again.
If you’ve recognised yourself in any of this, the nodding, the switching, the smile that goes on at the front door, that’s what a Hide and Seek Session is for. Forty-five minutes, and we start looking for the smallest doll.
Book your Hide and Seek Session
Not ready for that yet? Start with ten minutes. Give Yourself Permission to Stop