How to Stop Justifying Your Career Choices

The Question That Used to Wreck Me

You know the moment. You’re at a barbecue, or a wedding, or stuck next to someone’s husband at a work function, and they ask the dreaded question. “So, what do you do?” And whatever answer you give, you can see them quietly trying to reorganise their assumptions about you in real time. I’ve watched faces fall, eyebrows climb, and entire conversations curdle in the time it takes me to say my job title.

I’m an Executive Assistant. That’s the cleanest sentence I can offer. But I’m also a writer, a podcast host, a food blogger, a former life coach, a content strategist, and the kind of woman who can plan a CEO’s week down to the minute while also colour coding a friend’s wardrobe for fun. None of that fits on a name badge. None of that slots neatly into the small talk script. So I used to overexplain. I’d rattle off the side projects, the qualifications, the secret little skills, watching their eyes glaze over while I auditioned for my own life.

At some point, I just stopped. Not in a dramatic, burn the LinkedIn down kind of way. More like a quiet internal eye roll. I realised I was contorting myself to make my career legible to strangers, and the only person it was costing was me. So if you’re stuck in the same loop, trying to translate your messy, layered, beautifully chaotic working life into something palatable, this one’s for you, babe.

Stop Performing Your Career for the Cheap Seats

The people demanding a tidy narrative from you aren’t the ones living your life. They’re not paying your rent, taking your calls at 9pm, or sitting in your nervous system when a project goes sideways. They are, at best, mildly curious bystanders. So why are you handing them the script and asking for notes?

When you find yourself prefacing your answer with “I know it sounds weird, but…” or “It’s hard to explain, but basically…”, that’s your sign. You’ve already conceded the ground. You’ve already decided their understanding is more important than your reality. And once you start performing your career for an audience that didn’t buy a ticket, you’ll keep shrinking your answer down until even you don’t recognise it. You’ll be out here describing a whole rich working life like it’s an unpaid invoice.

The fix is honestly so unsexy. You just stop. You give the short answer. You let the silence sit if it needs to. You resist the urge to fill the air with a CV monologue. If they’re genuinely interested, they’ll ask follow up questions. If they’re not, congratulations, you’ve just saved yourself twenty minutes of explaining your portfolio to someone who was going to forget your name by Tuesday. Your career is not a TED Talk. Stop treating every interaction like a pitch deck.

Your Skills Don’t Have to Earn Their Keep

This is the bit that took me the longest to learn, so I’m going to be very direct with you. You do not have to monetise every single thing you’re good at. You do not owe the world a side hustle. You can be excellent at something purely because you enjoy it, and that is a complete sentence.

I run a food blog, and I cannot tell you how many times people have suggested I open a restaurant, launch a cookbook, start a supper club, sell meal plans, or pivot into recipe development for brands. Every single time I share a dish, someone tries to hand me a business plan. But the blog is the thing that keeps me sane. It’s where I get to write about food without a deadline breathing down my neck, photograph a plate in the light I love, and post when I feel like posting. The moment I turn it into a brand strategy with KPIs and a content calendar that owns my weekends, the joy of it walks out the door and never returns my texts.

The pressure to optimise every talent into income is exhausting and, frankly, a bit grim. Not every gift you have is a brand waiting to happen. Some of them are just lovely little things you get to do because you’re alive and curious. Protecting that part of yourself is a power move. Letting something stay soft and unpaid keeps it yours. The minute you turn every passion into a transaction, you’ve turned yourself into a vending machine. Sweetheart, you are not a vending machine.

A “Boring” Job Can Be the Smartest Move You Make

Now let’s talk about the job title that disappoints people the most. Mine. I’ve watched people physically deflate when I say I’m an EA, like they were hoping I’d say neurosurgeon or war correspondent. And I used to internalise that little flicker of disappointment. I used to wonder if I should want more, climb higher, take the manager role, chase the title that would impress people at dinner parties.

But the truth no one tells you about so called unimpressive jobs is that they can be the smartest, most strategic choice you ever make. The role I do gives me steady income, structured hours, and a brain that still has petrol in the tank when I clock off. I work with seriously powerful people, I hold real influence inside my role, and I get to leave it at the door at the end of the day. That stability is the soil my other work grows in. The writing. The podcast. The food blog. The hobbies I refuse to monetise. None of that would survive a job that ate me whole.

So if you’ve got a job that other people raise an eyebrow at, but it pays your bills and protects your energy and gives you space to be a full person, please stop apologising for it. You don’t have to climb a ladder just because it’s there. You don’t have to chase a title to prove you’re ambitious. Sometimes the most ambitious thing you can do is design a working life that actually lets you live. Choosing sustainability over status is not settling. It’s planning. The test isn’t whether your job impresses a stranger at a dinner party. The test is whether your job leaves you with enough of yourself at the end of the week.

Let Your Life Be the Whole Sentence

If you take nothing else from this, take this. Your career does not have to be a clean line from A to B. It can be a constellation. It can be a chaos spell. It can be six different things at once that only make sense when you zoom out and squint a little. The shape of your working life is allowed to look like you, not like a template someone else wrote in 2003.

People will still ask the question. People will still pull faces. People will still try to slot you into the role that makes them most comfortable, because a tidy box is reassuring to anyone who hasn’t given themselves permission to colour outside theirs. That’s their work to do, not yours. You don’t have to keep paying the social tax of being legible. You don’t have to keep filing yourself down so other people can shelve you neatly. Let them sit with the confusion for a minute. It’s character building.

So the next time someone asks what you do, give them the short version. Hold the rest for yourself. Let your life be wide and weird and a bit hard to summarise. The people who matter will keep asking questions, and the people who don’t will move on to the cheese platter. Either way, you win. Your career was never meant to make sense to them. It was only ever meant to make sense to you.

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we're screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don't know how to receive it.Here's the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We've been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We've been told these things are bonuses when they're actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.Today we're talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we've ever made for mediocre men. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @BryJaimea

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