A Letter on Letting Go of a Role

What I was far less prepared for was the sorrow that comes not from leaving a place, but from laying down a role that has quietly become part of how I move through the world.

It is not the loss of a title that troubles me. Titles have always seemed like small things—useful for organization, perhaps, but incapable of capturing the substance of what we actually give. What weighs on my heart is something less tidy: the realization that, over time, certain responsibilities settle so deeply into the fabric of our days that we no longer know where the role ends and we begin.