Writing to you from my weekend writing session, scattered with notebooks and a water bottle (it has been really hot these days!)

Hello,

For a long time, I’ve been struggling with the most frustrating writing problem: I couldn’t write like I speak.

Every draft came out sounding like a corporate memo. My blog posts read like strategy documents. Even casual social media updates were littered with phrases like “leverage opportunities” and “optimise outcomes.” I was describing a lovely Saturday lunch as “maximising weekend engagement with local dining establishments.”

It was maddening. Here I was, trying to write authentically about breaking free from corporate constraints, yet I couldn’t escape the very language patterns I was criticising.

Then it hit me: this wasn’t a writing problem. This was role absorption in action—the insidious process by which our professional identities colonise not just how we think, but how we express ourselves entirely.

Most people don’t realise it’s happening until it’s already taken hold. The transformation occurs in stages, each seemingly insignificant on its own:

Stage 1: The Language Shift

Instead of “I work as a Compliance Officer,” you find yourself saying “I am a Compliance Officer.” That tiny word—am—carries enormous weight. It signals that the boundary between self and role has begun to dissolve.

Stage 2: Values Integration

Corporate values are often presented elegantly in glossy manifestos. These polished principles don’t replace your personal values overnight—they begin to overshadow them. Slowly, imperceptibly, “what’s good for the company” transforms into “what’s good for me.”

Stage 3: Network Narrowing

Your circle consists entirely of colleagues and industry contacts, each interaction reinforcing the role-identity merger. The weekend dinner party becomes a gathering of job titles rather than interesting humans.

Stage 4: Complete Absorption

By mid-career, the person you once were—with her dreams, heritage, and distinctive voice—has been quietly edited out of your own story.

Here’s what I find fascinating: we’ve been conditioned to believe this is normal, even admirable. “Professional growth,” they call it.

But role absorption isn’t professional development—it’s professional colonisation of the self. The person you were before your first corporate badge becomes increasingly difficult to access, buried beneath layers of industry jargon and performance expectations.

What I’m Learning While Writing

This week, I’ve been wrestling with a particularly thorny question: How do we find meaning in work that feels fundamentally meaningless?

It’s one thing to talk about purpose when you’re crafting strategy or leading teams. It’s quite another when you’re completing your fifteenth internal control report, knowing full well that nobody will read it with any real attention.

I’m discovering that the answer isn’t to abandon bureaucratic work entirely (most of us can’t), but to develop what I’m calling “intelligent engagement”—finding pockets of genuine purpose within systems designed to discourage it.

A Small Experiment

Notice how you describe your non-work activities this week. Do you find yourself unconsciously framing personal interests in professional terms? “Networking” instead of “meeting interesting people”? “Skill development” rather than “learning something fascinating”?

Role absorption reveals itself in these small linguistic choices. When we start viewing our entire lives through a corporate lens, we’ve lost something essential.

What’s on My Writing Desk

Currently reading: Nicholas Kemp’s “IKIGAI-KAN: Feel a Life Worth Living” (exploring authentic purpose beyond Western productivity frameworks)

Currently writing: How to maintain personal agency within corporate systems.

Currently questioning: Whether some meaningless work is inevitable, and if so, how we protect ourselves from its psychological effects.

Until next week,

Inès

P.S. I’d love to hear your thoughts on role absorption. When did you first notice the shift? Hit reply and tell me—your experiences are shaping how I think about these ideas.

P.P.S. If you know someone who might relate to the Monday-to-weekend transformation I often write about, feel free to forward this along. We’re building a community of people who refuse to accept that work has to diminish who we are.

Writing the book I wish I’d had 5 years ago