When No One Needs You

I've spent most of my life solving problems.

It's how I earned trust, built credibility, made myself useful. The question was always: What needs to be done and how can I help? And I was good at it. Really good. I could walk into a messy situation and find the through line. I could spot the gap and fill it before anyone else noticed it was there.

For a long time, that felt like purpose.

And then it stopped.

No programs to manage. No inbox full of scenarios waiting for solutions. No one waiting for my next move.

Just me. And a question I wasn't prepared for:

Who are you when no one needs you to fix anything?

At first, it felt like failure.

Like I wasn't contributing. Like I was taking up space without earning it. Like my worth was tied to my usefulness, and without something to solve, I wasn't sure what I had to offer.

I kept waiting for the next thing to land, the project, the problem, the thing that would pull me back into motion. Because motion felt like progress. Motion felt like proof I mattered.

But the next thing didn't come. And the waiting continued to stretch.

Slowly, painfully, I started to realize something.

This space wasn't empty. It was expansive.

And it was teaching me things that urgency never could.

Without urgency, I'm starting to notice what I actually feel, not just what I can solve.

For years, my emotions were filtered through utility. If something bothered me, I'd ask: Can I fix this? Should I fix this? What's the most efficient path forward? And if I couldn't fix it, I'd move on.

But now, without a problem to solve, I'm just... sitting with things. Noticing what hurts. What feels heavy. What I've been carrying without realizing it.

It turns out feelings don't need solutions. They just need space.

I'm also starting to ask why I care, not just what I can change.

When you're always in motion, it's easy to mistake action for meaning. I cared about belonging, equity, systemic change, but I rarely stopped to ask why those things mattered to me personally. What part of my own story was I trying to resolve through the work?

The quiet is forcing me to sit with that question. And the answers aren't neat. They're uncomfortable, tangled, still forming.

But they're mine. And that feels important.

And maybe most surprisingly, I'm learning how I belong, even when I'm not contributing expertise.

For most of my career, belonging meant being needed. It meant showing up with something valuable to offer… insight, solutions, a way forward. If I didn't have that, I wasn't sure I had a reason to be in the room.

But what if belonging doesn't require contribution? What if it's just being part of something, without having to earn it?

I don't have the answers. And maybe that's exactly the point.

Because the quiet isn't asking me to figure it out. It's asking me to stop performing certainty long enough to notice what's actually there.

It's teaching me that rest isn't wasted time. That stillness isn't the same as stagnation. That my worth doesn't disappear when I stop being useful. It was just never tied to that in the first place.

I'm learning to trust something I can't name yet. Something that doesn't show up on a to-do list or a performance review. Something that feels fragile and new and a little bit terrifying. OK, a lot of terrifying.

But also? Kind of freeing.

So here's what I'm sitting with:

What if the spaces where we're not doing anything are the ones where we finally get to be something?

What if the quiet… the uncomfortable, unproductive, in-between quiet… is exactly where we need to be?

I'm still figuring it out. But for the first time in a long time, I'm not in a rush to get to the answer.

If you've ever found yourself in that space, where doing less invited you to be more, I'd love to know: What surprised you about how you showed up there?