How to Not Lose Yourself

This episode features Cierra Byrd, a mezzo-soprano opera singer who has spent more than a decade preparing roles that sometimes take five or six years to finally sing. We talk about what happens when your craft, your company, or your industry becomes the only place you go looking for proof that you matter, and what it costs to build something else instead. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾

There is a specific kind of quiet collapse that happens when the thing you built your worth around stops handing it back. It doesn't announce itself as a crisis. It shows up as checking LinkedIn for a promotion that was never coming because there was no one left to give it to you. It shows up as realizing you can't remember the last time you did something purely because it moved you, not because it moved a metric. Cierra and I spent this conversation in that exact terrain, and neither of us came to it as theory.

The Long Game Nobody Warns You About

Cierra prepares opera roles the way most people can't fathom preparing for anything. Some singers spend five years with a single character before they ever perform her in front of an audience. The role of Mimi in La Bohème has singers sitting with her for that long, sometimes longer, and the whole time the answer they're waiting on is mostly no. Cierra put the odds at ninety-five percent no, and she wasn't exaggerating for effect. You can have the technique, the range, the years of preparation, and still not get the role because someone in the room decided your voice was a half-shade too big or too light for what they already had in mind.

For a long time, what she was actually chasing under all of that preparation was a specific kind of proof. She named it directly: validation. Not just the role, but the badge that came with it, the competition win, the Rolex that Operalia hands its winners. She wrote an entire graduate paper investigating whether that badge actually mattered, using the career of a singer she admired as her case study, and the paper told her what she already suspected. The recognition didn't make the singer. The singer had already arrived before any of it. Cierra still wanted the badges. She just never got the timing to go after them, and at some point she had to be honest with herself about what that meant. Some things simply aren't your moment, and the work is learning to clap for the person it was.

I recognized that terrain immediately, because I built an entire career inside a version of it. I spent years as one of a small number of Black women recognized as leaders in the UX and design industry, writing for outlets like Fast Company, speaking at the conferences, carrying the weight of young Black women who told me they didn't think they had a place in the field until they saw me in it. What none of them saw was the cost underneath. An industry that prides itself on being human centered was, in my direct experience, one of the least human centered spaces I have ever worked inside. I was absorbing everyone else's pain about the industry while quietly running out of anything left for myself.

Two Different Rooms, Two Different Economies

Cierra described walking into an audition room the way most performers describe it: fifteen singers, five roles, and a scarcity mindset so thick it turns generosity into a liability. You watch people size each other up under a thin layer of niceness. Everyone competing for the same five slots starts treating collaboration as a risk instead of a resource.

Compare that to the entrepreneurship spaces I've been spending time in over the past year. New founders meeting me for the first time hand over their ideas freely, make introductions without being asked, and operate like there's enough room at the table for everyone at it. Then I go back to a design or tech industry event and remember exactly why I stopped attending them, the hoarding, the obsession with relevancy over the actual maturity of the practice. Cierra named the opera version of the same thing without missing a beat: when the goal quietly shifts from elevating the field to elevating yourself, something in you already knows it, even if you haven't said it out loud yet.

That shift is the tell, and it was never really about the ambition, it was about the exact point where you stop asking what would be good for the work and start asking what would be good for your visibility inside it.

Choosing Yourself When It Costs You the Room

I left the UX industry publicly at the end of 2024, and I knew exactly what it would cost before I did it. I stopped speaking at conferences. I stopped writing the thought-leadership pieces. And in the first week, my inbox filled with DMs from people, mostly Black folks, telling me how sad they were to see me go. I felt the guilt of that immediately. It sat right next to the relief.

Here is what I have had to keep telling myself since: I was never going to save everyone in that industry by staying exhausted inside it. The choice was between keeping something that was actively costing me and getting closer to the things that actually give me energy back. Grief still shows up around that decision sometimes, and I've stopped treating that as a sign I got it wrong. C.S. Lewis wrote a line I come back to often, that he sat with his anger long enough for it to finally tell him its real name was grief. Choosing yourself doesn't erase what you're grieving. It just means you stop performing a version of okay that was never true.

Cierra's version of this shows up in how she guards her friendships and her faith without apologizing for either. She's clear that certain lines, once crossed, mean a friendship is done, therapist fully on board with the decision. She's equally clear that a covenant relationship doesn't get the same exit clause as a friendship, and she holds both of those positions without softening either one to make them match. What we share underneath the specifics is the same discipline: know what you actually need before someone else's disappointment convinces you it doesn't matter.

What's Left When You Take the Role Away

The question that undid both of us in the best way came from a place neither of us expected. Cierra put it plainly: if you don't figure out who you are outside of your art form, you don't get to avoid the breakdown, you just get to postpone it. A lot of singers she knows are currently terrified about what happens to their work as institutions face funding cuts and uncertainty, and their answer, every time, is that they can't imagine doing anything else. That answer feels like devotion. It's also the exact spot where the identity and the output have fused into one thing, and one of them is a lot more fragile than the other.

I think about this constantly with the people I work with who are still inside corporate roles they've outgrown. If you haven't done the work of separating who you are from what you produce, your job will eventually do that separating for you, and it rarely does it gently. The framing I keep returning to: you are so much more than what you can produce, and that idea is genuinely countercultural, because almost everything about how most of us were raised trained us to believe the opposite.

Cierra found her way back to this the same year she almost lost it entirely, at a music festival called Ravinia outside Chicago, singing a devastating Mahler song cycle about the death of children for an audience she'd never met before. No company was watching her output that night. No one was analyzing her outfit or her choices. She sang the thing for its own sake, held fifteen seconds of silence with the room afterward, and had a man who rarely offered compliments tell her she'd handled it with finesse. She still holds that moment as proof, not of her talent, but of what it felt like to do the work without needing anyone's approval attached to it first.

We didn't finish the thread on what happens when the identity work is done and you still have to decide what to build next. That's the part I want to come back to in a future conversation, because knowing who you are outside your output is one thing. Deciding what to do with that knowledge is a different problem entirely.

If you're sitting with the question of whether something is actually wrong with your current situation or whether you've just lost track of yourself inside it, the Life Audit is where I'd point you first. It walks you through naming what's actually going on before you try to fix anything. Grab it here.

Originally aired as Episode 9: How to Not Lose Yourself, ft. Cierra Byrd on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.