About a year after I was downsized – still deep in the heart of COVID, with lockdowns and stay-at-home orders unless necessary – I took a job delivering refurbished goods to surplus stores. Sales and delivery. Boxes in the back of a truck. Routes. Invoices. Inventory.
On paper, it was practical. Income is income. Pride doesn’t pay the bills, and the whole world was in a prolonged slowdown, which may have come at a good time because I noticed how burned out I was. Within two days, however, something in me felt off.
I remember driving between stops thinking, What am I doing? Not in a snobbish way. Not in a “this is beneath me” way. In a disoriented way. For years, I had introduced myself as a writer. A communications professional and a storyteller. My work identity was built around words, ideas, deadlines, research projects, interviews, and bylines. Even when freelance life was unstable, the core identity held.
Now I was hauling refurbished merchandise into the back rooms of surplus stores. And it felt like the end of something. It didn’t help that the boss was abusive and volatile – the kind of personality that quickly erodes confidence. But the real issue wasn’t him. It was the internal narrative that had quietly taken hold: Maybe this is it now. Maybe the writing career is over, and I’d better accept it.
That thought is heavier in your fifties than it is at 30. At 30, you assume there’s another act. In your fifties, you start wondering about a lot of things.
Within three days, I quit. From the outside, it might look impulsive. Financially risky – even with plenty of my downsizing package nicely tucked away and a government program that paid out a monthly amount to keep everyone going who was downsized because of COVID.
What I now recognize is that I wasn’t quitting a job. I was fighting for an identity.
When you’ve built most of your adult life around a skill, a role, a profession – it isn’t just income. It’s how you locate yourself in the world. It’s how you measure worth. It’s how you answer the question, “What do you do?” Take that away, and something destabilizes.
That’s the quiet midlife crisis nobody prepares you for: The identity vacuum.
You wake up one day and realize the label you’ve worn for 30 years has been peeled off. You’re standing there with experience, memory, and muscle memory, but no clear category.
Who are you when the title disappears? Some people cling to the old version and pretend nothing changed. Some settle into whatever pays the bills and quietly shrink, while others go through something uglier – an ego death.
You have to separate who you are from what you did. And that is easier said than done. For me, quitting that job wasn’t about pride. It was about refusing to internalize the idea that the writer was gone. The times were uncertain, and no one knew how long the COVID crisis would last. The pandemic had scrambled everything.
But the identity wasn’t dead. It was bruised, though. There’s a difference. A lot of people in the 55–65 range are going through this, whether they admit it or not. Careers peak and fade. Industries shrink, and companies downsize. Our bodies age. Relevance shifts.
And underneath it all is the same question: If I’m not that anymore… what am I?
The rebuild isn’t about income first. It’s about identity reconstruction. And sometimes, you have to walk away from something quickly – even something practical because staying would confirm a story about yourself that isn’t true. The collapse wasn’t the job; it was believing I was finished. That turned out to be untrue.
johnberkovich.com 