I didn’t go into marketing because I thought I’d be good at it.

This job will break your brain if you let it, especially if you were a creator before you were a marketer.

A quick note before I begin. Starting this month, I’ll be sharing a letter like this once a month, always on a Sunday. I’m calling it ‘Dear Reader.’ It’s a space for me to write from the gut, and it’ll usually be about something I’ve been wrestling with or carrying a little closer to the heart. If it resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Even just a line. It’s nice to know that there’s someone out there that can confirm all this writing is not for nothing.

Dear reader,

I didn’t go into marketing because I thought I’d be good at it. I went into it because I liked making things. Photos that made people feel something. Fragments of writing that traveled further than I expected. I liked curating—though we didn’t call it that yet—and watching what happened when something personal crossed into public space.

That’s how I learned social. Not through an online course, not in some mentorship cohort in college, not even in a professional context. I just grew up with the internet. I posted. I watched. I tweaked. I copied people I admired. There was no strategy behind it. No conversion funnel. It was just what I liked to do.

Eventually, someone said, “You should try running a brand account.” I was working at a nail salon at the time, sending out job applications with freshly printed résumés and no idea what I was actually aiming for. So I said yes. I mean, it seemed easy enough.

It’s funny how those little yeses accumulate. That first “why not” turned into a decade-long career. It was never something I chased, but I stayed. I kept showing up. People gave me more work. I did the work. And somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of it as something I was experimenting with and started realizing it had become my actual career.

The title changed, and so did the stakes. I run marketing now. I don’t just grow accounts or be told to “make it go viral.” I lead strategy, manage performance, deal with metrics, justify results, allocate budget, try and forecast future performance and predications but the core of the job still comes down to making things and putting them into the world for people to respond to…or not.

Some people ask how I “broke into tech” or “built my personal brand,” and I never really know how to answer that. Those phrases sound clean and intentional. They make it seem like there was a roadmap like I somehow optimized for this. But the truth is, I just kept posting. That’s all it was. That’s all it still is.

And lately, I’ve been wondering, maybe some of you have too, what happens when the job is built on instincts you developed as a person, not as a professional? What happens when your eye for detail, your taste, your timing, your voice—these things that used to feel like you—become your performance indicators?

I write something and can’t tell if it’s actually good, or if I’ve just been on the internet so long I’ve internalized the cadence of what performs. I chase trends I don’t care about, because I don’t want to fall behind. I open reports and forget what I was even trying to measure, only to realize the post flopped because it went live during a breaking news cycle.

This feeling isn’t what I’d define as burnout exactly. It’s more like a simmering down of the boiling heat that I felt for this work. That sense of clarity I used to have of knowing why I liked something, or why I made it—that’s dulled over time. The things that once felt energizing now feel like more fucking noise. And I don’t think it’s because I’ve stopped caring. I think it’s because I care so much I’ve learned to second guess everything.

I keep asking myself whether any of this is still meaningful. Or whether I’ve just gotten really good at making it look like it is. And I don’t have a satisfying answer. I’m not going to wrap this up with advice about boundaries or make suggestions that you ought to be reclaiming your creativity or whatever else LinkedIn loves to peddle.

All I’ll say is this: if you started out as a creator, and your instincts were formed in that weird, vulnerable space of making things you loved without knowing if anyone would care—this job hits different. And it can feel lonelier than it looks.

Because now, all those skills you built in private are getting measured in public.

And some days I wonder if I’m still doing meaningful work, or if I’ve just gotten very good at performing the version of someone who is. But I keep showing up. I make the things. I post the posts. And maybe that still counts for something.

I’ll have twelve weeks of maternity leave to sit with that thought. We’ll see what comes of it.

—Christina