It's a Hell of a Responsibility to Be Yourself
“It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”
-Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath wrote something that has stayed with me since the first time I read it:
“It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”
As a career coach — and someone who spent years being somebody else professionally — I think about this line a lot.
Because here's what I see, over and over, in the people I work with: brilliant, capable, accomplished professionals who have built impressive careers and still feel strangely hollow inside. On paper, everything looks right. The credentials. The title. The salary. The parents who are proud.
And underneath all of it — a quiet ache. The sense that they are living someone else's idea of a life.
The Scripts We're Handed
From the time we're young, we're given scripts.
Be practical. Choose security. Make us proud. Don't take risks with something as important as your career.
These messages usually come from love. From parents who lived through scarcity and wanted better for us. From guidance counselors who meant well. From a society that has very clear ladders for very specific kinds of success — and far less patience for the person who says this doesn't fit me.
So many of us followed the script. We became the doctor, the lawyer, the accountant, the engineer. Or we drifted into something adjacent to our education, stayed because the salary was good, and woke up at 45 wondering how we got here.
Plath named this perfectly: it is easier to be somebody else. There's a whole infrastructure of approval waiting for you if you make the expected choices. Nobody challenges you. Nobody asks hard questions. You just follow the path that's already been cleared.
The problem is that easier doesn't mean better. And it certainly doesn't mean fulfilled.
What the Misalignment Actually Costs You
I've sat across from people at the top of their fields who feel completely hollow. People with corner offices and generous salaries who dread Monday mornings and can't remember the last time work felt meaningful. People who've done everything right — and feel, in some fundamental way, that they've wasted something.
What they're grieving isn't failure. It's the years spent silencing their own instincts. The curiosities they never pursued. The unconventional, creative, or sensitive parts of themselves that were quietly deemed impractical and set aside.
Plath understood this too — that denying your true self doesn't make it disappear. It fractures you. And those fractures will eventually demand your attention, whether you're ready or not.
In my experience, they tend to show up loudest somewhere between 40 and 55. When the external rewards stop being enough. When the career that once felt like an achievement starts feeling like a cage.
That's usually when people find me.
Why Being Yourself Feels So Terrifying
Here's the thing about Plath's “responsibility” — it's not abstract. It has real costs.
Being yourself means potentially disappointing people who love you. It means tolerating uncertainty instead of following a guaranteed path. It means stepping off the well-lit road and trusting an inner compass that may never have been publicly validated. It means saying out loud: this isn't working for me anymore — and having people look at you like you've lost your mind because everything looks fine from the outside.
No wonder so many people choose somebody else instead.
But I want to say something clearly, because I think it gets lost in the noise: no career — no matter how prestigious, no matter how lucrative — can compensate for the loss of your own voice.
You can perform success for a long time. But you can't perform fulfillment. Not indefinitely. Not without a cost.
The Work of Coming Back to Yourself
What I've learned — from my own winding path and from years of coaching people through these crossroads — is that the work of becoming yourself isn't a single dramatic moment. It doesn't happen when you hand in your resignation or get the new job offer.
It starts with questions. Honest ones.
What actually energizes me — not what should energize me, but what genuinely does?
What values am I not willing to keep compromising?
Whose approval am I still chasing, and why does it still have this much power over me?
If the salary and the status weren't part of the equation, what would I be doing?
These questions aren't indulgent. They're essential. Because the answers are where your actual path is hiding.
And here's what I want you to know: this isn't selfish work. When you're living in alignment with your true self — your actual strengths, your real curiosities, your genuine values — you contribute more. More honestly. More creatively. More sustainably. You stop performing your career and start participating in it.
The world doesn't need more people doing impressive things they don't believe in. It needs people who have found the thing they were meant to do and are doing it with everything they've got.
You Are Allowed to Choose Differently
If you're standing at a crossroads right now — feeling the weight of other people's expectations sitting heavier than your own instincts — I want to offer you this:
You are allowed to outgrow the path you chose at 22.
You are allowed to want something different than what you've built.
You are allowed to choose a direction that actually reflects who you are now, not who you were expected to become.
Yes, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. Plath was right about that.
But it's also the only career worth building.
Kendra Court is a career coach for mid and late-career professionals and the author of The Thing You Were Meant to Do.
