I don’t think I want to become less of myself

I got fired last week.

Which is still a really weird sentence to type.

I have spent a truly embarrassing amount of time since then trying to figure out what exactly I am supposed to learn from it. Because obviously there has to be a lesson, right? There always has to be some beautiful lesson where you look back and realize everything happened exactly the way it was supposed to and suddenly you’re wiser and stronger and blah blah blah. I am not there yet.

Right now I mostly have questions. And one of the biggest ones is whether I am supposed to learn how to care less. Because I care about work. Like… a lot. Probably too much sometimes. I don’t mean I care about having a job or being successful or climbing some corporate ladder. I actually don’t think I’ve ever cared very much about any of that.

I care about the thing. The idea. Whether it’s good. Whether it makes sense. Whether people actually like it. Whether it feels like something. If I see a website that doesn’t work, I want to fix it. If something is confusing, I want to understand why. If we’re creating something and I know it could be better, I have a really hard time just saying, “Well, good enough.” I want to make it better. This sounds very charming when I write it here. It is not always charming in real life. 😂 Because I also ask a lot of questions. I get frustrated. I push. I get emotionally invested in things that probably do not technically require emotional investment. And I have absolutely found myself thinking about some random customer journey at 10pm when a normal person would simply… not be doing that. But I don’t really know how to turn it off.

My brain does not understand departments particularly well. It doesn’t go:

Marketing problem. ✅
Not marketing problem. ❌
Please redirect to appropriate department.

It just sees something. Then immediately:Why is it like that? Why are we doing it that way? Does that make sense? What if we did this instead? And then somehow I have rebuilt an entire theoretical system in my head when I was originally just supposed to update a webpage. This is how I ended up doing some of the work I am most proud of. It is also, I think, part of how I end up in difficult situations. And I need to be really clear here because I don’t actually know why I was fired. I wasn’t given a reason. So maybe this had everything to do with it. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. Probably reality is much more complicated than the story my brain desperately wants to solve. But I do know that I brought a lot of myself to work. Maybe all of myself sometimes. And I have been wondering whether that was a mistake.

Maybe next time I am supposed to stay in my lane. Maybe next time I need to be quieter. Care less. Ask fewer questions. Stop trying to fix things that technically aren’t mine to fix. Do the job. Go home. And I understand why some of that would probably be healthier. I really do. I need better boundaries. I cannot keep personally adopting every broken process I encounter like a stray animal. Not everything needs me. Not everything is mine to fix. Not every good idea needs to become a project. I am learning that. But then there is this other part of me that gets really sad when I think about becoming too good at that. Because what happens if I actually succeed? What happens if I become really good at seeing something that could be incredible and going, “Not my problem”?

I don’t want that. I don’t want to become less curious. I don’t want to stop getting excited when I can suddenly see the whole idea. I don’t want to stop caring about tiny details that somebody else thinks don’t matter. I don’t want to stop asking why. And I definitely don’t want to spend the rest of my career trying to figure out how to make myself easier for other people to deal with.

Better? Yes.

More self-aware? God, yes.

Better boundaries? PLEASE.

But smaller? I don’t think so.

And I think this website is somehow connected to all of this. Which is funny because when I started building it, I really didn’t know what I was building. I still don’t. I have had Jordan Alexis Creative off and on for years, but I’ve always thought of it as my “freelance business.” And I don’t think that’s what I want anymore. I don’t really want a separate creative business over here and my professional career over there. Because they aren’t separate. They have literally never been separate. That’s probably the point. The person who builds the marketing strategy is the same person who gets way too excited about a font. The person who likes building systems is also the person who will spend an unreasonable amount of time making the system prettier because I genuinely believe making it prettier can make it work better. The person thinking about customer journeys is also thinking about why the internet feels so boring now. It’s all coming from the same brain. This one.

The one that apparently has a lot to say. And I miss this. I miss people having their own little places on the internet. I miss blogs. Actual blogs. Not “5 Ways to Improve Your Brand Strategy in 2027.” I mean somebody sitting down because they cannot stop thinking about something and writing it out. No content pillar. No lead magnet. No CTA. No reason really. Just… I was thinking about this today. Here it is. I want that again.

I want somewhere I can talk about creativity and marketing and work and websites and AI and things I’m building and things I don’t understand yet. And probably life sometimes. I want to be allowed to have an idea before I’ve figured out whether it is useful. I want to make things because I want to make them. And I want somewhere for all the thoughts that do not fit neatly into a LinkedIn post. Maybe that’s what this is. I don’t know. I am very much figuring it out while I am doing it. Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much how I do everything. I don’t know exactly what happens next professionally. That is scary. And exciting. And mostly just really, really weird right now. But I do know one thing.

Whatever I do next, I don’t want the lesson from all of this to be that I should become less of myself. I think maybe I just need to get better at knowing where all of myself belongs.

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