At 3:17 on a Tuesday afternoon, I had a PowerPoint open called “August Performance & Engagement.”
Behind it was a Word document containing a woman, a god, an old kingdom, several generations of grief, and a plot problem I had been trying to solve for three days.
A Teams notification appeared in the corner of the screen.
My next meeting was in thirteen minutes.
I saved the manuscript, closed it, went back to the slide deck and spent the next few minutes trying to find a better way to explain a YoY impressions of our meta business content.
There was nothing dramatic about this.
It’s not like I’m getting caught living a secret life.
My colleagues did not know that a few seconds before discussing website traffic, I had been wondering whether my heroine should forgive the patriarch who had ruined her life. And the characters in my book did not care that I had a marketing meeting. Microsoft Teams, as ever, remained professionally indifferent to everybody’s inner complexity.
At 3:30, I was simply the version of me required at 3:30. And I have been thinking about that ever since.
I have spent a large part of my adult life becoming very good at answering the question, “What do you do?”
Marketing B2B SaaS & PLG for disruptive tech.
That’s the cleanest answer.
Depending on the room, I can make it cleaner. RM and lifecycle journeys. Demand generation. B2B SaaS positioning. Sales enablement. Content operations. Funnel optimisation. Attribution. Brand strategy. Pipeline.
These are useful answers I’ve practiced giving, because adulthood rewards useful answers.
Nobody at a networking event wants you to say, “Well, technically I spend a slightly unreasonable amount of my life thinking about imaginary people.”
People in networking events want the noun.
Manager. Writer. Working Mother. Marketer.
Something they can place under my name on a small rectangle.
The strange thing is, once a noun pays your (very good) salary for long enough, it begins acquiring authority over the rest of your identity.
I haves tarted introducing myself with it. Other people introduce me with it.
My entire week bends around it My calendar fills with evidence of it. My bank and my assets account depend on it.
I am asked where I see myself in five years, and I am expected to answer using a more senior version of the same noun. I see myself being the marketing director of a company. I see myself leading a team of product marketers and building a repeatable marcom tech stack which can generate qualified leads month over month.
Meanwhile, entire countries with their own complex magic systems and political histories are being built inside of me that have nothing to do with my promotion cycle.
I have been writing these stories for years. A decade and a half to be precise.
Not “I would like to write a book someday.”
Actively Writing.
Finishing manuscripts. Publishing books. Rewriting things I was once convinced were finished. Sending work out. Hearing no. Hearing maybe. Hearing yes and then finding out that yes is merely the beginning of an entirely different sequence of waiting.
I am now an agented fantasy author and my debut is doing its first round of international submissions as I write this but I have absolutely nothing to show of it.
Another book I wrote has been optioned for the big screens and I have been actively in and out of writing rooms, in pre-developmental hell with that story for more than two years now. But it’s still alive. The project’s still got a pulse, and its so close, so very close to being green lit but then, I still have nothing to show for it. YET.
I have watched fictional people remain stubbornly alive in my head through review meetings, pregnancies, deadlines, illnesses, school mornings, bills, salary revisions and grocery lists.
Sometimes I think that is the strangest thing about a creative life.
The outside world can completely ignore it, and it will continue anyway.
A story does not need to be impressed by your designation.
It just keeps knocking.
For a long time, I thought one of these versions of me would eventually win and the other would retire.
Maybe that is what ambition teaches you to expect.
One day, you finally become The Thing.
The successful writer. The senior leader with stakes in a company.
The woman with the impressive answer. The person whose life stops requiring footnotes.
But every time one part of my life became more serious, the others refused to politely disappear. Instead, it became competently more serious.
I became better at work and became better at writing more.
I became a mother and somehow wanted both home and my career more fiercely than before. I earned more money and became more interested, not less, in what money could buy back from work.
Time. I can outsource all the cooking, cleaning and child care that I can. I could also buy back choice.
A Tuesday afternoon to spend shopping with my mother.
I now have the ability to say no without checking a bank balance first. And I am so grateful for it. Proud even. But somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that this meant I was indecisive.
Old stories are actually much better at this than modern professional life. If you think of it, nobody in mythology has one name.
A god can be gentle here and terrifying there. A woman can be daughter, mother, lover, ruler, destroyer, protector. Names change depending on who is standing before them, what has happened to them, what is being asked of them.
I guess the core philosophy with fantasy is that contradiction isn’t a branding problem. Contradiction is treated as part of being alive.
We seem to have lost some tolerance for that multitude.
Now we are constantly asked to compress ourselves.
“Choose your niche.” “Define your professional identity.” “Write the headline.” “Polish the LinkedIn bio.”
“Make the story make sense!”
And perhaps this is especially strange for people who want many things. Because I do want many things. I do not want a small life. Hell, I do not HAVE a small life.
I want to write books that outlive whatever job I happen to have when they are published.
I want to make very good money. I want work that uses my brain properly. I want to make things. I want to do all this while being home with my children. I want rooms full of people to know my name. I want days when nobody needs anything from me.
I want significance. I want peace. Apparently, if it were up to me, I would also like eight additional hours added to every day.
There are weeks when these desires coexist beautifully.
There are other weeks when they behave like relatives who should never have been seated at the same wedding table.
And yet I don’t think the answer is choosing which one is the “real” me anymore.
That might be the lie I’ve been raised to believe, the lie I am learning to unlearn.
My job title is not wrong about me. It is simply describing the part of me someone currently pays for.
The rest does not become less real because it is harder to put on LinkedIn.
The woman writing before everyone wakes up. The mother cutting grapes in quarters to avoid choking hazards while thinking about a line of dialogue. The person calculating what more money could change for her family.
The employee who genuinely cares about doing excellent work. The ambitious woman who occasionally resents how much excellent work can consume. The person who has failed at things she still wants. The person foolish enough to continue wanting them.
The person I was at twenty-three. The person I thought I would be by thirty. The person I am becoming despite both of them.
None of these women are side projects.
That is the part I wish we spoke about more when we talk about ambition. Not simply how to get ahead. But what happens to all the selves that come with you.
Because, have you noticed how corporate careers have such neat language for progression? Associate becomes manager. Manager becomes director. Director becomes something involving the word “head.”
There are boxes. Levels. Reviews that can be cleared. Objectives that can be set in yearly KPIs and squashed.
My private life rarely offers this courtesy.
Nobody sends an email saying: “Congratulations. You have now officially become braver about rejection!”
My ability to begin again has exceeded expectations. If you knew my life from the inside you would know that I am now 84 percent less frightened of wasting my life than I was in the first quarter of 2026.
Some of the most important promotions in my life happened without anyone changing my title.
Perhaps that is why I have started becoming suspicious of biographies.
They make a life look terribly obedient.
She studied this. Then she worked here. Then she became this. Then she wrote that. As though one self politely handed the keys to the next self.
My life has never worked like that. All my selves are all still here. Sometimes competing. Sometimes collaborating. And frequently demanding budget.
And maybe the goal isn’t for me to finally become someone whose life can be explained in one clean sentence.
Maybe the goal is to stop asking one sentence to carry the whole thing.
Tomorrow, I will probably open the PowerPoint again.
There will be numbers to explain, meetings to attend, things to get signed off and finished. I will care about them. I will want to be good at them. I don’t see a single monday in horizon where I wake up hating my job. I wish I could fit into that bollywood aesthetic where the main character chases their dream despite hating their corporate job.
But the truth is God built me to thrive corporate hustle as much as he built me to whip up entire worlds in my head. I came out of my mother’s womb like Meryl Streep playing Miranda Priestly. That is just who I am.
And somewhere behind that powerpoint window there will probably be another scrivener document open.
Someone will be waiting inside it.
I like that she doesn’t know my job title. I like that she has never asked. Maybe there should always be something in your life that doesn’t ask you your job title.
Something that knows you by another name.
Still becoming,
Bala.
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