The Role You've Outgrown but Haven't Left

Image by @markusspiske from Unsplash

We've all seen them — the reckless, thoughtless, mindless drivers who've caused an accident, or are one bad decision away from causing one.

Being the proud wife of a husband who is, without fail, an alert and thoughtful driver, I've had a front-row seat to a fair share of these near-misses. Once we've recovered from the fright and driven safely past the offender, we always wonder the same thing: how did this person ever pass their test?

Recently, we had another encounter. As we drove past, I turned to my husband — his eyes still fixed on the road, sensible as ever — and said, "That was a middle-aged person driving."

I paused.

And then it hit me. I'd recently joined the middle-age club myself, having turned forty this year.

Here's what I noticed in that pause: I don't feel my age. I don't think I look my age. And in front of my husband and the people closest to me, I don't think I behave my age either.

So which is it? Have I outgrown my twenties, or have I simply refused to leave them?

I think the honest answer is both. I've outgrown the phase. I haven't outgrown the identity. There's a lag between the calendar and the self, and nobody warns you about it. You expect ageing to feel like a slow fade. Instead, it arrives as a label first — a birthday, a form, a stranger's glance — and your insides take their time catching up, if they bother to at all.

It made me think about how often this exact pattern shows up at work, too, in a slightly different costume.

Someone gets promoted into a leadership role, and for the first six months they're still doing the job of the person they used to be. Still the one who jumps in to fix the spreadsheet at 9pm. Still the one colleagues go to for the quick answer, because that's the reputation they built two roles ago. The title has changed. The org chart says they've grown. But the instincts, the reflexes, the sense of who they are in a room — those haven't left. They've outgrown the role on paper and haven't left it in practice.

And then there's the opposite version, which might be closer to my driving story. Someone quietly outgrows a role — a job, a way of working, a way of being seen — long before they announce it, even to themselves. They know, somewhere underneath, that the fit is gone. But leaving feels like admitting the old identity was wrong, or wasted, or over. So they stay in the role a little longer than the role deserves, performing a version of themselves that used to be true.

Neither of these is really about competence. It's about timing, and about how attached we get to the self we've already proven works. Growth doesn't announce itself with a clean handover. It leaves you holding two identities at once for a while — the one you're stepping out of and the one you haven't quite stepped into — and asks you to be patient with the overlap instead of forcing a verdict on it.

I'm forty now. I don't feel it, and maybe I never fully will. But perhaps that's not a problem to fix. Perhaps it's just proof that I'm still mid-transition — not clinging to a role I've outgrown, just taking my time to leave it properly.

So here's a question worth sitting with, wherever you are this week: is there a role, a title, or a version of yourself that you've quietly outgrown, but haven't yet let go of? And if you left it today, would it be too soon — or long overdue?