I USED TO commute weekly between Brisbane and Sydney for work.
Early morning flights, airport lounges, hotel rooms, back-to-back meetings.
At the time, I wore the exhaustion and frequent flyer status like a badge of honour. It made me feel important. Needed. Chosen.
One afternoon in November 2019, I had just finished a meeting in the Sydney office when I was unexpectedly asked into another room with HR.
The conversation was brief and procedural. I was instructed to leave immediately and return to Brisbane. A formal meeting had been scheduled for the following day at the Novotel Brisbane Airport, where I would be given the outcome.
I remember almost nothing after that.
I sat numb on the airport train, staring blankly through the window as the city passed by. I moved almost subconsciously through the terminal, onto the plane, and eventually home. The entire experience felt surreal, like I had suddenly become disconnected from my own body.
That night, I didn’t sleep.
I lay awake trying to control outcomes that no longer belonged to me.
My mind cycled endlessly through possibilities, negotiations, explanations, solutions. My chest was tight. My jaw clenched so hard it hurt. I couldn’t eat. I could barely breathe.
Then came the meeting.
The next day, I walked into a cold, dark conference room built to hold hundreds of people but occupied by only four.
When the final outcome was delivered and I was officially fired, the numbness returned instantly.
I remember walking aimlessly back to my car afterwards.
No anger. No dramatic outburst. Just emptiness.
It felt like I had been shot.
Like I had died.
And in many ways, something had.
Author of ‘Conscious Footsteps’, Dion Elliott Jensen.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that I hadn’t just lost a job. I had lost the identity I had spent years building around it.
My title had become my self-worth.
My salary had become my sense of importance.
My influence had become my value.
Without realising it, I had outsourced my identity to an organisation that could take it away with a single conversation.
And it did.
The months that followed were some of the darkest of my life.
At first, I feared telling my family. Then I feared facing former colleagues. Eventually, I feared social situations altogether.
Not because people were cruel, but because I was ashamed.
I thought I had failed.
Failed my family.
Failed myself.
Failed the version of me I had worked so hard to become.
At barbecues or school events, I became anxious before anyone even asked how work was going. I would mentally rehearse responses in advance, trying to appear calm, successful, unaffected.
“Oh, things are good.”
“It’ll all work out.”
“Just exploring a few opportunities.”
I became skilled at performing stability while privately falling apart.
What’s confronting to admit now is that many people only knew me as the title, the role, the success story.
But that was all I had ever let them see.
No one explicitly tells men that their worth is tied to usefulness. We absorb it slowly. Through praise. Through status. Through silence.
We learn early that being needed feels safer than being known.
So we perform.
We achieve.
We provide.
We suppress.
And eventually, many of us build identities entirely around external validation.
I certainly did.
Success, to me, wasn’t really about money, even though I told myself it was. It was about what money represented: importance, influence, recognition, certainty, feeling chosen.
Achievement became emotional armour. Every promotion, financial milestone, and outward symbol of success temporarily soothed an insecurity I didn’t yet understand.
But external validation is unstable by nature. The moment your identity depends on something outside yourself, you begin living in fear of losing it.
And underneath that fear sits another question entirely:
If I stop performing, will I still be enough?
That was the question waiting for me after I lost my job.
Without the role, I no longer knew how to introduce myself. I no longer knew who I was outside productivity, achievement, and usefulness.
For the first time in my life, I had to sit with myself without the costume.
And what I discovered was grief.
Not just grief for the career I had lost, but grief for the fact I didn’t actually know myself beyond it.
The irony is that the rejection and judgement I feared most never truly arrived.
What arrived instead was love.
Compassion.
Acceptance.
The people closest to me did not withdraw when the title disappeared. They leaned in closer.
And slowly, painfully, I began to realise something that changed my life:
The people who truly loved me were never asking me to perform in the first place.
I had spent years believing I needed to earn love through usefulness.
But real connection was never built on my title, income, or achievements.
It was built on honesty. Presence. Authenticity.
Work matters. Ambition matters. Providing for the people we love matters too.
But when achievement becomes identity, we place our self-worth in dangerously fragile hands.
Because jobs end. Titles change. Money comes and goes.
And eventually, every external version of who we believe ourselves to be will be challenged.
The real question is:
When that happens, what remains?
Dion Elliott Jensen is the author of Conscious Footsteps – An intense unravelling. A return to self. A walk back to truth.
Related:
How the death of a friend prompted Gus Worland to take action on men’s mental health
Breaking the silence: a paradigm for saving a life from suicide
