Dear person who is their job title,
For two years, the answer to "what do you do?" was the best sentence I owned.
I was running partnerships at a multi-billion dollar crypto startup and building a blockchain-enabled fine jewelry company on the side. That sentence opened rooms. It changed the register of conversations. In certain circles — startup people, ambitious people, people who measure each other in exactly this way — it carried a very specific weight, and I knew it, and if I'm being honest I leaned into it more than I'd like to admit.
Then I left. And the answer became: I'm a jeweler.
I was not prepared for what that felt like. Not the financial adjustment, not the operational chaos, not the learning curve of going from the most junior person in brilliant rooms to the most senior person in rooms I now had to carry on my own. All of that I'd anticipated. What I hadn't anticipated was standing at the first event after I quit, someone asking what I do, me saying "I run a jewelry company" — and watching their face do the thing faces do when they're recalibrating their interest level.
I felt like an Indian uncle at a wedding introducing himself by his job title. Reaching for the credential because without it I wasn't sure what I had.
That's a hard thing to sit with. The idea that so much of my confidence had been load-bearing on a title someone else had given me. That "partnerships lead at a multi-billion dollar startup" had been doing work I didn't know I was outsourcing to it — telling people I was smart, that I was serious, that I was worth listening to. And now that sentence was gone and I had to figure out who I was without it doing that job for me.
The ego work of leaving something prestigious is the thing nobody talks about honestly. The financial risk, the operational uncertainty, the loneliness — those are the acceptable fears, the ones that sound strategic when you name them. The ego piece is the one nobody wants to lead with because it sounds small. It isn't. It's the hardest part.
What I had to learn — not by reading it anywhere but by living the discomfort of it — is that the title describes where you are, not what you're capable of. The mistake is treating them as the same thing. I could be a jeweler today and build the next platform in this space tomorrow. The answer to "what do you do?" is always a snapshot, never the full picture. The people worth impressing already know that.
The rooms changed too, and not in the way I expected. I went from being the most junior person around brilliant people — challenged constantly, learning constantly — to being the most senior person in my own operation. I lost my mentors overnight and became the mentor. That transition is a different kind of hard that nobody warns you about either. But it compounds in ways that the other kind doesn't.
The dinner party answer gets better when you stop trying to make it impressive and start making it true. I run a jewelry brand I built from a viral video. We just had our highest-grossing month ever. That sentence doesn't open the same rooms — but it's mine in a way the other one never was.
The title is the floor — not the ceiling.
Sincerely Shreya
There's more to this one. The version I hadn't figured out how to say yet is on Substack.