Journal - The Weight of Beginning Again

There’s a strange quiet after years of being introduced.
For so long, my name carried a certain gravity in my field — the kind that opened doors, filled rooms, and placed me behind podiums in cities I’d never been to before. I taught classes to strangers who knew my work before they knew my face. I spoke at conferences where my bio was printed in glossy programs, my expertise a given.

Now, as I think about shifting into this other world — the one that feels closer to my marrow — I can’t help but wonder: will I become invisible?
Will I trade the certainty of being “the expert” for the anonymity of starting over?

It’s humbling, this thought.
To imagine introducing myself without the armor of accolades. To picture building trust from the ground up, brick by brick, in a place where no one knows my history. I’ve spent years cultivating a reputation, and here I am, considering walking away from the very stage I built.

And yet… there’s a pull.
A whisper that says expertise is not erased, only transformed. That the skills I’ve honed — the way I teach, the way I hold a room, the way I weave knowledge into something people can feel — will follow me, even if the subject changes.

Still, I find myself asking: how do you plant a flag in new soil?
How do you invite trust when your credentials belong to another world?

Maybe the answer is the same as it’s always been: show up. Share what I know. Let the work speak until the work is known.
It will be slower this time. Quieter. But perhaps that’s the gift — to build not from the urgency of proving myself, but from the truth of who I am now.

For now, I stand in this pause, feeling the weight of both loss and possibility. My old nameplate still sits on the shelf, polished by years of recognition. My hands hover over blank parchment, the ink not yet flowing — but ready.