Who I Was When the Only Answer I Had Stopped Fitting

So what do you do? It is one of the easiest questions to answer at a party, and for years my answer was “I’m an actor,” a sentence that covered my job, my friends, and my sense of who I was. I’m Laura Simms, and I run Your Career Homecoming, a career coaching practice in Atlanta where I have worked with more than 450 professionals over fifteen years. If you built a life around something you have outgrown, and you cannot picture who you would be without it, I wrote this story for you, and I will not pretend the ending was tidy.

Leaving acting took me a long time, and I did it badly. Clients have told me that losing a career they loved felt like a death in the family, and I understood exactly what they meant because I had felt it myself.

The Answer That Covered Everything

I moved to Los Angeles to act, and the work shaped everything around it. My peer group came from it, I met my husband through it, and everyone who knew me knew me as an actor. Giving it up meant answering a question I had never practiced: who would I be without the work that had been my North Star for so long? The business is also a hard one to stay in, since only 14 percent of SAG-AFTRA members earn the $26,470 a year that qualifies them for the union’s health plan (Source: Rolling Stone, 2023).

What finally turned me around was a picture that stayed with me. On set, I realized there were fifteen other women lined up behind me who were taller and better looking, and any of them could be dropped into my role and the day would roll on exactly the same. I wanted work where my absence would be felt and the stakes ran higher than whether I had fun that day.

Five Books, a Therapist, and Still No Answer

I did everything a sensible person does in a career crisis. I read five career change books, flipped through Oprah magazine, talked it over in therapy, and took the assessments. I learned a great deal about myself and still had no idea what to do next. During those years, I also worked as a personal assistant, which meant cooking in someone else’s kitchen for five hours at a time, listening to a podcast full of entrepreneurs and creatives, and wondering what I was supposed to do with my life.

Every resource handed me one puzzle piece, and none of them could tell me which life I was choosing or which parts of myself I wanted to lead with. I could not find the person or the resource I needed, so I decided to become that person.

Starting Clunky, Starting Anyway

Starting a business felt survivable, because an actor is already an entrepreneur who books her own work, and I figured nothing could be harder than the entertainment industry. The question underneath frightened me far more: if I yanked away the thing I had organized my life around, what would be left?

I started Your Career Homecoming in 2011 because I wanted to be of service and to call the shots. Those first few years were messy. I spent them asking where I fit, what I offered, and who it was for. Slowly the work settled into helping high achievers choose a career that fits them, and it felt like full circle to build the exact support I had searched for and never found.

The Sales Call and the Doctor’s Appointment

The reinvention kept going. When I became the sole breadwinner for our family, I was still doing all the mom stuff, and it took us several months to see what was happening. Wives are the sole or primary breadwinner in 16 percent of opposite-sex marriages in the United States (Source: Pew Research Center, 2023), which put us in the minority.

The breaking point came when my three-year-old had what was probably yet another case of strep. I was about to cancel a sales call to take him to the doctor, and a perfectly capable adult was sitting downstairs with nothing on his schedule. I brought it up with some anger and frustration and no guilt. My husband agreed quickly. He became the first number on the preschool’s call list, then the person who scheduled doctor visits, then the one who handled school emails and teacher communication.

Pew found that the only type of marriage where husbands spend more time than wives caring for others in the household is the one where the wife is the sole earner (Source: Pew Research Center, 2023). We had been two individuals each holding up our own part of the world, and looking at the family as a system has changed how we communicate and how we make decisions.

Who I Am Becoming

I am becoming someone who says the inconvenient thing out loud and keeps learning from lives that look different from mine. I have taken formal training, mostly from women of color who teach diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and the coaching industry, and I read widely and follow people whose experience differs from mine, because understanding why a client holds a belief helps me guide her better.

Next on my list is working with people who have the experience and ambition to build something bigger than a job, and sitting down as a guest on a podcast I used to listen to in that kitchen.

For the Woman Who Thinks It Is Too Late

The mean age of the founders behind the fastest-growing one in a thousand new U.S. companies is 45 (Source: American Economic Review: Insights, 2020), and that number is worth keeping in your pocket if you have ever told yourself you are too old to start over. You are allowed to grieve the identity that ended and to fumble for a few years. The woman you are becoming gets to keep everything you learned from the last one.

If you are somewhere in your own becoming and want help choosing what comes next, my free WHOLE Method masterclass is where most people start, and you are always welcome at Your Career Homecoming.