The Palatable Version of Me Makes the Grown-Up Money

I don’t like confessing this, but I’ve come to realize that I have a deeply ingrained belief that there is something I need to fix or change about myself and my authentic point of view in order to be a professional and make a good living. I suspect that other women building businesses in midlife might have this same mythology operating under the surface of this chapter of their careers.

For me, I think this comes from being an artist who pivoted that aspiration in my 20s in order to have a Career with a capital C that fit into the Adult (with a capital A) life I was so desperate to establish.

I also think it comes from being a Gen X woman in the workplace who learned to keep her head down to stay employed through the tumultuous evolution of the media business in order to keep a career she felt lucky to have.

Deep down, my instinct is to be a truth-teller, to speak truth to power and call bullsh*t on bullsh*t. But I’ve never really been that person at work. That’s not how you keep a job. By virtue of being in a corporate context for 20+ years (and also because of gender-based socialization and general good manners), I learned to shave the edges off and keep my mouth mostly shut pre-emptively.

At work, I walked the line between being outspoken enough to be honest and fun so I could attract creative collaborators, and as palatable as possible to the people who employed me to be successful at the tasks I was being paid to accomplish. I let the artists and comedians whose work I championed and produced be the outspoken ones, the real ones, while I backed them up and rose in my corporate career. That was my compromise: self-expression by proxy.

*photo credit: Dan Almasy

The genuine distance between who I have been in a professional context and who I am in the most authentic version of myself is probably not as far a leap as I think. I’ve always tried to be “myself” in the human interactions with colleagues and partners and artists I worked with.

But what I’ve been unwinding for the past several years is what it feels like to not have to shapeshift anymore. That’s one of the gifts of self-employment, but also one of the things women who are making this pivot from employee to owner need to unpack when it comes to reinventing our beliefs about where money comes from.

I have an old story in my head that I only earn money if I am the palatable version of myself that succeeded in corporate life. But I don’t want to have to be that person anymore, especially not when I’m taking on all of the labor and risk of building my own business. I want to feel 100% like myself inside of that experience.

Being in my 50s, self-employed, divorced and peri-menopausal, I finally feel free from the structures (and hormones!) that were conspiring to sand down my edges and make me palatable to the greatest number of people. I no longer need everyone to like me - I only need to connect with my people, and there are more than enough of those to make my life and my work rich and impactful.

Since I left Snapchat in 2023 I have been reclaiming the spirit of that edgy 20-something who did performance art and one-woman shows and surrounded herself with like-minded creative strivers.

I have been evolving into the self-employed midlife professional version of that young woman, and the business I’m building is a community of women who crave the same thing and want to help our peers succeed on our own terms.

The problem is that what I’m realizing is that part of me still thinks the airbrushed, smoothed-over, corporate-sanctioned version of me is the only one that makes grown-up money.

I have a big vision for the woman I’m becoming — the one I like so much more, the one who is closer in spirit to the artist I was in my 20s and the outspoken, question-everything midlife free spirit I am on the Hotter Than Ever podcast than the corporate success I was in my 30s and 40s. I know objectively (and from a career in show business) that my inner rabble-rouser is already making an impact in the lives and dreams of women building businesses they can never be fired from, and that she is super monetizable.

I’m doing the deep work I need to do to let that limiting story go so I can claim my midlife reinvention with even more power and agency. What myths and unconscious rules are holding you back?

Love,

Erin