Reflect
The reset button
On transition, doubt, and the value you can't see in yourself.
With Mental Health Awareness Week coming up I thought I would reflect on transition, doubt, and the value you can't see in yourself.
I got the interview. And that's when the doubt arrived.
Not before, after. I'd cleared the first barrier, which meant it was real now. And something in me responded not with confidence, but with a question I hadn't expected to be asking at my age: am I actually good enough for this?
The doubt doesn't only wait for failure. It shows up when you're succeeding too.
Not just for this role. For any of it. In a world where the pace of change outstrips most people's capacity to keep up, where technical skills feel like they need updating before you've finished learning them, I found myself wondering: how do I compete?
That's what transition does. It strips away the scaffolding that was quietly holding your sense of self in place. The title, the meeting invites, the daily rhythm of being needed; they were all doing more work than you realised. Remove them and the gap opens fast.
I had a last all-hands meeting at work. It passed without acknowledgment. And I sat with that, the feeling of being invisible. It stings. Not because I need recognition for its own sake, but because being unseen compounds the doubt that's already there.
But here's what I also noticed: a colleague had quietly prepared something to mark the occasion. He saw it. Both things were true at once; the oversight and the witness. Transition is full of that. Not purely dark, not purely light.
I've spent my career helping organisations understand and adopt technology. I help communication flow. I form new language that makes complex things navigable. I decomplexify; I take what is technically dense and make it humanly accessible. I am, in the best sense of the word, glue.
Glue. That's not a soft skill. That's infrastructure.
And yet in the middle of looking for my next role, none of that felt like enough. Because the world was asking me to compete on speed, on technical depth, on the kind of credentials that look clean on a CV filter. And I kept measuring myself against a metric that was never designed for what I actually do.
Here's the irony I've had to sit with: I spend my days helping humans stay relevant in an age of AI. And I was wondering if I was relevant.
Mental health and professional transition are more intertwined than most people admit publicly. The low that comes in the gap between roles, or at the end of a chapter, isn't weakness. It's disorientation.
You're not broken. You're in a transition, and that is genuinely hard.
I've found my character is shaped more by challenge than by smooth transitions. The harder seasons don't just test you, they make things visible; what matters, what doesn't, and the kind of environments I want to be part of. Cultures where people are seen, where leaving is acknowledged, where quiet contributions are named, where pace isn't the only measure of value.
These experiences haven't made me disengage. They've helped me re-orient. The reset button is genuinely difficult to press. But pressing it anyway, staying honest about the difficulty, refusing to pretend the gap doesn't exist, that's where the commitment comes from.
We're not taught how to live in the tension.
I think part of the struggle is this: we're not taught how to live in the in-between. We're taught to aim for clarity, for arrival. But transition doesn't offer that on demand. It asks you to function while things are still unresolved. To hold both truths at once; that you're moving forward, and that you don't fully know where you'll land.
Maybe that's the work. Not eliminating the tension, but learning how to live inside it without assuming it means something has gone wrong.
Mental Health Awareness Week 2026 runs 11 to 17 May. For more tips and information visit mentalhealth.org.uk.