The Woman I Became

When I was twenty-five, I had a very clear picture of who I was going to be.

She was polished. She was certain. She had a corner office and a clear trajectory and she never, ever doubted herself. She had figured it out — whatever "it" was — and she moved through the world with the easy confidence of someone who had never had to question whether she belonged.

I spent a long time trying to become her.

I never did. And I'm grateful for that now.

The Woman I Planned to Be

The woman I planned to be was, in retrospect, a performance. A projection of what success was supposed to look like, assembled from the images I'd absorbed: the powerful women in films, the polished executives in magazines, the senior leaders I'd watched from a distance and decided were the template.

She was impressive. She was also not real.

Real women — the ones I've come to know and admire most — are not polished in that way. They're complicated. They have histories. They've failed at things and recovered. They've been wrong and admitted it. They carry their experiences visibly, not as flaws to be hidden but as evidence of a life actually lived.

The woman I planned to be had no history. She'd arrived, fully formed, at the top.

The woman I became had to climb.

What the Climb Looked Like

It looked like the job I was passed over for, three years running, while less qualified people got the role. It looked like the mentor who turned out to be working against me. It looked like the burnout I didn't see coming, and the long, slow recovery that followed.

It looked like the relationships that didn't survive my ambition, and the ones that did. The friendships that deepened when I stopped performing and started being honest. The conversations at 2am with women who were also climbing, also afraid, also pretending they weren't.

It looked like therapy. Like hard questions I didn't want to answer. Like sitting with the discomfort of not knowing who I was when I stripped away the performance.

It looked, at times, like falling apart.

What I Found in the Falling Apart

Here's what nobody tells you about falling apart: it's also how you find out what you're made of.

When the performance stops — when you're too tired or too broken or too honest to maintain it — what's left is the real thing. The actual you, without the armour.

I found, in those stripped-back moments, that I was more resilient than I'd thought. That I had instincts I'd been overriding for years that turned out to be right. That the things I'd been most afraid of — being seen as uncertain, being wrong, being human — were actually the things that made people trust me most.

I found that I was funnier than the performance allowed. More curious. More willing to say "I don't know." More interested in other people's stories than in managing my own image.

I found, in other words, myself.

She's Not Who I Planned

The woman I became is not polished in the way I imagined. She has opinions that sometimes make people uncomfortable. She says no when she means no. She talks about failure without embarrassment. She asks for help.

She's been wrong about important things and she knows it. She's been hurt by people she trusted and she's still standing. She's built things and watched them fail and built them again.

She's not certain. But she's honest about her uncertainty, which turns out to be more useful.

She's not who I planned to be. She's better — harder-won, more honest, more herself.

And she's still becoming. That's the part I didn't understand at twenty-five: you don't arrive. You keep becoming. The work doesn't end; it just changes.

I'm glad I stopped trying to be the woman I planned and started becoming the woman I am.

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The full story of who I became — and the journey it took to get here — is in Confessions of an Imposter. Available now on Amazon — and the audiobook is live this week too. Listen to the audiobook on Audible — narrated by the brilliant Sarah Kowalchuck.