How do you find yourself again after you have already spent years becoming someone else? In my last piece, I left off with a woman pressing send on a three-line email. I did not tell you then that I know exactly how that moment feels, because I have done it more than once, and the biggest time I did it was not about a single business decision at all.
This story is mine. I shared the experience and the ideas, and I used AI to help shape the writing.
This piece sits with Hexagram 24, Return: the season of learning how to find yourself again after a long stretch of drifting, with relief instead of a verdict. It is also, not by accident, where My Daily Return got its name.
The Quiet Course-Correct
I am not, at my core, a career woman, and that was never the plan, not from the very beginning of my working life. I found myself in a boardroom as a shareholder analyst in investment banking because I was a single mother raising children with no financial support from their father, and that job paid for what mattered. By 2015 my children were grown and out of the house, which meant, for the first time in years, I could choose meaning over money. I had the kind of title that explains itself at dinner parties, and I walked away from it anyway, back to a smaller firm, a smaller role, and a lot less money, in Cape Town, the city I actually call home. Return is not glamorous. Nobody photographs the part where you retreat to reconnect instead of pushing forward on autopilot, because it looks, from a distance, like giving something up.
Five years later I did it again, bigger this time. In 2020 I left South Africa altogether and got on a plane to Canada with no job waiting on the other side. My family was here. That was the entire plan. I was not running toward a clearer version of myself, and for a long time after, I felt genuinely lost in my own identity, unsure who I was outside of the roles I had just left behind. I measured myself against the woman I had been in that boardroom, and every new title felt smaller. Executive assistant, however skilled the work actually is, is not the sentence I used to introduce myself with at those dinner parties, and for longer than I want to admit, I let that comparison run on a loop I never chose to start.
Breaking a pattern that has run its course
It is quieter work than people expect. It was not one dramatic realization. It was noticing, slowly, that the loop kept restarting itself the moment I stopped paying attention to it, and that the only way to end it was to catch it mid-sentence, again and again, until catching it stopped taking so much effort.
Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.
Etty Hillesum
Here is the part I am still living, not the part I have already resolved. I spent twenty years building administrative and governance skill I am genuinely good at, and I am using every part of that skill right now, in the quiet of early mornings, before the day asks anything else of me, to build something that has nothing to do with a boardroom and everything to do with the version of myself that boardroom never had room for. My Daily Return is not a reinvention. It is the clean slate courage this hexagram keeps pointing at, coming back to the truth clean and willing, not becoming a stranger to yourself in order to start over.
I am not writing this because I have finished returning to myself. I am writing it because I am still doing it, most weeks, sometimes most days, and I have stopped waiting to feel fully arrived before I say so out loud.
What would it look like to return to something today instead of reinventing it from zero?
Coming back to center takes more courage than starting over from scratch, and in my experience it also tends to work better. If this is a season you recognize, the free guide, 5 Ways to Trust Your Inner Knowing Again, has more of this, ten minutes at a time, no chart required.
