The Version Of Me I Had To Let Go Of

Welcome to Suits and Pajamas, where grace meets grit and ambition learns how to breathe. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to SuitsAndPajamas, the podcast where we talk about balancing our work selves with our personal selves and navigating the realities of the modern workplace. I'm your host, TJ Albert, and today I want to talk about someone I used to know. She was younger than me, more certain. She had this belief, this full, unguarded, completely sincere belief that if you worked hard, if you just worked hard enough, and if you produced quality work, the recognition would come that the system was basically fair, that merit was the currency, and if you accumulated enough of it, the doors would be wide open. She wasn't foolish. She was earnest. And there's a difference. And I have spent a long time figuring out what to do with her, whether to celebrate her or mourn her, whether she was a version of me I outgrew or a version of me that got taken. I haven't fully let go of her yet. And I want to be honest about that, because I think a lot of us tell this story from the other side, as if letting go is complete, as if we have arrived at some clean and peaceful acceptance of who we no longer are. I'm not there, and I don't think I'm supposed to pretend that I am. And so today's episode is about the version of ourselves that we have to release in order to become who we are or who we are meant to be, and the grief that nobody gives us permission to feel about losing them. This is suits versus pajamas. And this one, this one is quiet, but it matters. So grab your coffee, tea, or wine, and let's have a little chat about becoming. Now, let me tell you my specific story. Well, let me tell you a little bit about her, that other girl, that younger version of who I am today. She was hard working. Genuinely, constitutionally, she was a. This is just who I am kind of hard worker. Not to be seen, not to prove something, because she believed the work mattered and she really wanted to do it well. She was the first in her family to pursue a corporate career, and that meant something to her. So she was truly just fixated on curating the best life that she could for her daughter and herself, and she wanted to have the that career. So as she was working, her reviews reflected that she was a top performer consistently. She showed up, she delivered, she advocated for teams the way she wished someone had advocated for her. I know you've heard me talk about this before, but at the time, she believed it she truly believed that this was the currency, that if she kept accumulating it, the doors would open on their own. Big mistake. Mistake number one. So she drank the Kool Aid. And I say that with tenderness, not contempt. I know a lot of people weaponize, you know, drinking the Kool Aid, but that's not what I'm here for. Because the Kool Aid was everywhere. It was in every career advice column, every mentor conversation, every professional development framework that she had ever been handed or had exposure to, work hard, produce quality advance. And so she believed it because she was told to believe it. And because for a while, there was enough evidence to sustain that belief. She just didn't have enough experience yet to see that that wasn't necessarily the case. So that shift didn't happen in one moment. It happened in accumulation. Promotions that didn't come. Responsibilities that increased without the title, without the pay, without the acknowledgment that she was already operating well above her level. She watched colleagues, white colleagues, male and female, advance in ways that her performance had already surpassed. She watched people fail up. She has the receipts. She has the testimony. And then came the moment that crystallized everything. Every promotion that she had ever received, every single one, required her to build a presentation. First, a documented case, a timeline of increased responsibilities, a catalog of wins. Not just her performance, but her team's performance, too. The promotions that she had advocated for and won for others, the results that exceeded expectations. Year over year. She had it all, but yet she still had to document it and present it as if she was a circus clown. She had to perform. But again, she built the presentation. She presented it. And each time, not at once. Again, not just one time. I'm sorry, every time. There was no pushback. It was rubber stamped and done. So it was like she went through all this effort and we're talking hours and hours of putting together thoughtful materials to support her request to be promoted was rubber stamped. No pushback whatsoever. And that's when she understood. They knew. They always knew they had the same information that she had. They just weren't going to take action until she forced the conversation, until she made the invisible visible, until she did the labor of proving what they already knew was true. For her white colleagues, that labor was not required. She watched it over and over again. The recognition arrived without the presentation the advancement came with, without the catalog. It was almost like it was a foregone conclusion that these people would get their promotions. So therefore, there was no need to do these decks to prove their worth. That was the Season, not a single day. Again, a slow accumulating receipt building Kool Aid. Losing season that ended with her understanding something she could not unknow. And here it is, folks, especially for black and brown women. This is what I want you to understand. The freeway was not designed with her in mind. I want to sit with this metaphor for a moment because it is going to become a much larger conversation. It is the foundation of work that I'm doing beyond this podcast. I actually talk about it briefly in my memoir, Suits and Pajamas, a memoir about grace, grit and becoming. It's. There's a chapter on this, but I'm actually writing something bigger around this particular metaphor and this concept that I'm going to share with you here today. But I wanted to introduce it here because it belongs in this story, because this is kind of the origins of how this. This is the genesis of how this came to be. So the freeway, the one that was supposed to take me where I was going, no carpool lane access. I had the competence, I had the receipts, my indicator was on, I was ready to merge. And no one would let me in. Not because I didn't qualify, but because the lane wasn't built or designed for me to come in. It was almost like there were those. No one would let me in, or there were double solid lines that said, you cannot come in. And there were seasons where I ended up on the side of the road completely stuck. And no one stopped. No one came to help. I flicked the. I fixed. I fixed the flat tire myself. I got back on the freeway myself. I figured out the route for myself every time. So that younger version, the one who believed the road was fair, I had to let her go. I had to let her go. But that belief was too central to who I was at the time. So when it broke, something in me kind of broke with it. And I haven't fully grieved that yet. And I want to be honest about that, because I do find myself going back to that emotionally sometimes, because it's just, I. I just feel sometimes like surely this time I won't have to do it again. Just this one. I don't know how many of you have felt this way. You. You think this time they're going to get it right and then they don't. And. But you keep hoping and after a while it becomes exhausting because you realize it's just not going to happen. And then there's that. That fork in the road, if you will. Do you muster up the strength to go through this all over Again, or do you say, eff it, I'm out of here. Kind of like my last episode where I talked about how I didn't even have another job lined up, and I just made the decision that for the betterment of my own health, my family, I needed to make a decision and ended up being the best decision, by the way, that I ever made in my career. So yay for that. But I just want to, like, break this down a little bit to show you the suits version of this conversation and the pajama side of this conversation. Now, let me start with the suits side and let me give it its full respect, because it's not wrong. It's just what I would call incomplete. The personal development world has built an entire language around releasing old versions of yourself, shedding, limiting beliefs, outgrowing the identities that no longer serve you. And there is genuine wisdom in that framework. The woman who believed exclusively in meritocracy, if she had held onto that belief completely, it would have eventually broken her. It would have broke me. The updating was necessary. The growing was necessary. And so the suit side says, every version of you that you have or that you've ever had to leave behind made you who you are. So it's what doesn't make you. What doesn't break you, makes you stronger kind of concept, right? So she. She was not wasted. She was foundational. The work ethic, the quality, the advocacy for her teams, none of that dis. Disappears when the belief system updates, right? When you get that upgrade, so it just comes with you. It becomes the fuel for what you build next. I hope that makes sense. So the suit side of you also says, the grief is a luxury you cannot afford to live inside indefinitely. You, I had in my mind, like, I had to tell myself, like, you have this podcast to build. You have a book to write. You have a brand to launch, a parallel life running 6 to 9 on both ends of the day. The version of you that is doing all of that. I needed the old version to break first so that I could see this, that breaking was necessary, preconditioning. So I thanked her and I moved on. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the psychology of letting go. And look, I'm not talking about her proclaiming to be some freaking psychologist, okay? We all know better. So for anybody who thinks that's what I'm trying to do, I'm not. But I know that psychologists who study identity transitions talk about something called identity foreclosure. And that's the state of being locked into a single belief about who you are and how the world works before that belief has been fully tested by reality. That's evidentiary. That's fact. That's a term. The suit side of this research says the collision, the moment that reality contradicts that belief is painful, but it also is the beginning of real identity formation. So the woman who comes out on the other side of that collision knows herself in a way that the unchallenged version never could. Sounds logical, right? She's been tested. She knows what she is made of. That knowledge is not available any other way. You have to go through it. So there is something to honor in that the breaking made room for something truer, more authentic. And the suit side says, focus on what was made possible by the loss, not the loss itself. And so now I want to talk about the pajamas side, my honest perspective. So let's talk about the. This thing about letting go as a framework. Letting go implies the release was yours to make, that you chose to put her down, that you evolved past her on your own timeline, in your own way, because you were ready. That is not what happened. That's not what happened. What happened is that a system showed me repeatedly and specifically, that it did not intend to honor what I had been promised. And the belief that I built my professional self around that merit as the currency that the road was navigated was built for anyone who was willing to do the work. That was not something that I had released in the past. It was something that was taken. And there is a difference between outgrowing a belief and having it disproven. One is evolution, the other is loss. And the pajama side of this says if we skip past that distinction, if we dress the loss up in language of growth before we have actually grieved it, we carry it anyway, just underground, where it goes to do more damage in a quiet way. And so I just want to really hit home with this. That, like, it just doesn't go away if you don't really grieve it. You have to grieve that version of yourself and let it go, because you will carry it forward. I know I did it for years, which is why I feel very strongly about this and how I've been working really hard on becoming the person that I am now again. One of the reasons I wrote the memoir was because I wanted people to understand, like, the person that I am today. It came from someplace. I don't even recognize that person anymore. It feels like it was so long ago. And so I wrote the Memoir to kind of help you to understand why I have such an appreciation now for where I am and the authentic leader that I try to be and the teams that I try to build and the people that I try to mentor. It matters to me because I wish I had somebody like me, you know, was building my career. Right. So I digress a little bit. But let me pivot back to the pajamas and this ambiguous loss that we experience sometimes. There's a family therapist, Pauline Boss. Gotta love that name. Boss lady. Pauline Boss. She wrote something that she calls. She wrote about ambiguous loss, and that's grief that happens without the clarity of a traditional ending. There is no funeral for the version of yourself that you had to leave behind. Right. There's no marker. There's. And frankly, there's no moment where the world acknowledges what you lost and they don't give you permission to mourn it. So most of us don't. We reframe it. Right? We call it growth. So if that's how you want to call it growth, fine. I think that's kind of putting a band aid on it, but that's fine because we put the gratitude language on top of it, and we keep it moving because there's so much work to do, and so we can't. We don't give ourselves permission to sit in it. But the grief is still there. And again, I know because I haven't quite finished mine yet. Much better than I was years ago, but there's still something there, and I'm working on it, and I'm aware of it, and that's why I talk about it on my podcast and even to people in person, like, I'm. I'm pretty open about it. The. What I want to share now is, like, what she. Or what I felt I deserve to hear. This is what you deserve to hear. The pajama side of this has to reckon with something that the suits version skips. And again, I'm not saying suits is all wrong, but here's the deal. She was not. I was not. You were not naive. She was. I was. You were lied to. The meritocracy that we all believed in. At some point, it was presented as fact. I remember that very clearly for many years in my career. It was, like, presented as if it was a fact, because it was the culture, the messaging, the professional frameworks that I was handed, and I'm sure you've been handed as well. There were people who told me to work hard and trust the system. They weren't all wrong, but they were Also not describing my path, my journey, my experience, because I didn't have proximity, I wasn't in the room. They were describing their own. Because many of the ones that actually talk about this system, that talk about how. How if you work hard, you'll get there, those are people that were describing their own experiences and journeys. And oftentimes they didn't look like me. And so the difference between those two roads was significant, documented, and it was never disclosed to me that way. So I take my little happy butt on the freeway that wasn't built for me, and I drove on it like I belonged, right? I didn't know. There were signs that told me which direction I could go. There were off ramps that I was not permitted to get off on. And so I ended up on the shoulder sometimes. And as I shared earlier, like, I always felt, not always, but many times, I felt like I was passed over when my ideas were taken, when that promotion required, that presentation that I mentioned earlier, that my colleagues never had to do. I didn't fail. The road failed me. And that distinction matters not to assign blame. I'm not here to do that because not every job I've ever had performed that way, but 80% of them did. I can honestly say that. And I really want this to hit home for you, like, you cannot grieve something properly if you believe you caused it. So you need to understand the freeway wasn't designed with you in mind at every job or every role that you take on. But you have to see it, because once you see it, you'll know how to navigate it. And so there are many of us out here that are carrying that grief, though, as personal failure. And I don't want that for you. I already dealt with it for you, so to speak. So I'm trying to share some of my experience. Stop looking at that road, that freeway, thinking that it's. The lanes are all equal and designed with you in mind. There are some lanes that you might navigate a little bit earlier, but when you try to put on your indicator to get over in the far left in that fast lane, that carpool lane that just seems to be cruising along with no bumps, smooth, right? You may be on the sideline, on the side of the road with that flat tire, or you could very well be in the slow lane, right? You just can't get enough momentum behind you to get over. And the people over in that cruising lane, well, they were given GPS coordinates. They were. They were given the comfortable car. They were given, like, it was fully loaded with gas. All the things that's their journey. And if that's what you thought you were going to experience when you began your career again, depending on the structure and the culture of the company, you don't stand a chance. Well, I know that sounds so negative, and that's not typically my personality to be so negative. I'm not going to say you didn't stand a chance. Let me. Let me backtrack a little bit. I will say you will be left behind if you don't see the signs. So we all have heard that play checkers versus chess. Yeah, most of my career I was playing checkers. I wasn't playing chess. But anyway, so here's what I actually believe. After everything, I'm still in the middle of it. I haven't fully let that younger girl go, that younger professional go. And I'm actually getting to a place where I think that that's okay. Not as an excuse to stay stuck, because I'm not stuck. There are just some versions of ourselves that don't need to be fully released. They need to be properly honored first. And since I haven't done that yet, I've been too busy building to stop and grieve what was lost in the building. And what I mean by that is there's another job that I had back in the day. Have you ever had that job that you left that you just can't stop thinking about? You can't stop replaying the things that didn't go well. Part of that grief is fits in that scenario. And there's like, you know, one role in particular that I had from time to time. I just go back to it because I feel like, gosh, what could I have done differently to have been more valued, like, in the right way, in the most meaningful way? Not from a performance review, because like I said before, I got great performance reviews. That's not what it was about, but it was about the proximity and being treated as an equal to my counter, to my peers and my colleagues that I knew weren't performing. They came to me for answers. They came to me for advice and leadership, and I freely gave it. But when I replay that old role, there's a part of me that I still haven't fully released yet from that experience. So the good news is with all of the those issues in the past and not properly grieving, which is okay, like, I'm giving myself some grace here. I don't need to solve all the world's problems within myself. I'm grateful that the work ethic that I had. It came with me. The quality that I insisted on, that came with me, the way I advocated for teams, because I knew what it felt like not to be advocated for. That came with me. So she's still in here, not as the belief, but as the foundation of everything that I do. And what I had to leave behind wasn't her. It was just the innocence, that naivete. I had to let that go, the unchallenged trust that the road was fair, that I do grieve fully, because it was a kind of a freedom that allowed me to write about it and talk about it where I knew what I now know, what I'm up against, and I plan accordingly. And so what I know now, again, is that the freeway was not designed with me in mind. I know that now with clarity, and I cannot unknow it. So no carpool lane access, no one making room in the fast lane. There are going to be seasons on the shoulder, fixing things alone, getting back on the road alone. There's possibly still those seasons in my career. I don't know. But at least what I do know is that the young. What the younger version of me could not have known is that the. The answer was never to drive harder on someone else's road. That's not the answer. The answer was to build my own. And I've been doing that, and it's been great. So the podcast, the book, the other things that I have coming up, that parallel life, that's my lane. I. I know people are moving away from DEIB and don't like saying the word fine, they're an acronym, whatever. But I care about the work of making room and space for others to lead and live authentically. So that's what matters to me. That's my lane. Not a carpool lane that somebody granted me access to, not a fast lane that someone finally let me merge into. It's my lane, built by me, owned by me, on a road that I'm still drawing. So if I could say something to her, that younger version, the one who believed the road was fair, the one who fixed flats alone on shoulders while others cruised past, it would be this. The freeway wasn't designed with you in mind, but you drove it anyway. You showed up on a road that was not built for you, and you performed at a level that made them have to acknowledge you even when they decided not to. You built that presentation that they rubber stamped because they already knew you fixed every flat alone. You found every route without a map that was drawn for you. You are not naive. You are honest. The road that I built is now one that's built on truth and authenticity, not lies. And I'm sorry it took me this long to say that, because we keep things in. And I think I was just so busy moving forward to stop and just say that properly that I don't have it all figured out. I'm still becoming. And so I just want you to know I see you and I see that version of myself that is still in progress. But I am done grieving her, and I'm building something worthy of what she went through. All right, that's gonna do it for today's episode of Suits in Pajamas. Please remember that growth requires releasing old versions of yourself. Not just let go of a version of yourself the way you don't need old clothes, but instead, I mean, letting go in a way where you recognize it as evolution. The woman you were was a stepping stone. Be grateful for her and keep it moving. Until next time. Take care.