Dear Friends,
To the new faces here this week — welcome. You showed up at a good time.
I had a call last week with a reader of this newsletter — a classical musician who is moving toward a new chapter, thinking about what a different, part-time kind of work might look like.
Somewhere in the conversation it came out that I used to be a musician too. An oboist, in fact. From fourth grade until I was about thirty-five.
She got quiet for a second, and then she asked me a question: Do you miss it?
I didn't have to think about the answer. I don't.
That surprised her a little, I think. It surprises a lot of people. We tend to assume that leaving something you trained for that long — hours a day in a practice room, years of rehearsals, an identity you built before you were old enough to drive — must leave a wound behind. That somewhere in me there's an oboist in mourning.
There isn't. That was another era. I'm glad I lived it, and I don't ache to return to it.
But the call stayed with me after we hung up, because it sent me back to my own crossing — the years when I stopped being someone who played the oboe and became someone who used to. And the question that hovered over that whole stretch was the one underneath almost every transition I've ever watched: if I'm not the thing I've always been, who am I?
Here's what the distance has shown me. I am, in almost every way that matters, the same person I was in that practice room.
The discipline that put me there at six in the morning is the same discipline that builds a business. The part of me that came alive on stage is the same part that comes alive now when I'm speaking to a room — it turns out I didn't love the oboe so much as I loved performing, and performing found a new form. Even the hustle of a working musician, the scrappiness of stitching a career together from pieces, reads now like early training for entrepreneurship. None of that was musician. All of it was me. Music was simply the first place those traits had to live.
That's the part we get wrong when we brace for a transition. We think the identity is located in the role — that we are the oboist, the surgeon, the business owner, the partner — and so changing the role means losing the self. But usually the role was just the first container. The self was never inside the instrument. It was holding it.
When you understand that, a transition stops looking like a death and starts looking like a relocation. The same person, carrying the same essential equipment, setting up in a new place. The work isn't manufacturing someone new. It's recognizing who was there the whole time, and giving them somewhere to go.
That's the distinction I keep coming back to. Not what you'll do next — but who's doing it. And how much more of you is portable than you'd ever guess from inside the role you're standing in.
Warmly,
Cara
Future Identity Strategist
Founder, Good Morning Freedom