26 BLACK WOMEN
Losing Yourself Trying to Be Strong
When Work Becomes Your Identity
Joyel Crawford
Joyel spent years building a career around showing up, delivering, and meeting expectations. She worked until the work was done, not until the workday ended. Somewhere along the way, productivity stopped being something she did and became something she measured herself by.
She didn’t have language for it then, but she was living what happens when work becomes your identity. Insomnia, stress-related illness, surgeries, and exhaustion kept piling up while she continued being everything to everybody except herself. Even when her body was signaling that something was wrong, stopping still felt harder than pushing through.
LISTEN TO JOYEL’S STORY
“There was no such thing as an eight-hour day.
It was just working until I couldn’t work anymore.”
WHEN OVERWORKING STARTED COSTING HER HEALTH
Joyel had spent years pushing through the signs. Insomnia became normal. She was sleeping only a few hours a night, grinding her teeth hard enough to crack them, and dealing with pain she kept trying to explain away. Then the physical symptoms became impossible to ignore.
The pain eventually led to urgent care, testing, a fibroid diagnosis, and more than one surgery. Even then, the pattern of work did not simply stop. She was still helping, still handling things, still being everything to everybody except herself.
It took a team of doctors telling her that the stress of the environment was putting her health in serious danger for Joyel to fully confront what overworking had become. The job was no longer just exhausting her. Staying was costing her more than she was willing to keep paying.
WHEN LOOKING STRONG COST HER SUPPORT
Even when Joyel finally decided to leave, part of her still wanted to leave looking like she had everything under control. In her exit interview, she did not tell the full truth about what the job had done to her mental health. She said she was leaving to start a business instead.
Looking back, she can see that pride was part of it. She didn’t want to be seen as someone who could not handle the job. But protecting that image came with a real cost. By not being honest about why she was leaving, she walked away without severance and without qualifying for unemployment.
The harder truth was that Joyel had been suffering in silence for a long time. She had built a successful career, was moving toward executive leadership, and had spent years proving that she could make it in corporate America. Admitting that the environment was hurting her felt like admitting something about herself.
“I was suffering in silence, and I didn’t want to let them down. I had acquired all of this to make them proud of me. And here I am thinking, I can hack it in corporate America.”
WHEN SHE DIVORCED CONSTANT PRODUCTIVITY
Leaving corporate America did not automatically change Joyel’s relationship with work. When she started her own business, she brought the same habits with her. Overworking, skipping meals, pushing through grief, and tying her value to what she produced followed her into entrepreneurship too.
Working with her therapist, Joyel began to see that the problem was bigger than a job. She had built a relationship with constant productivity itself. So when she said she felt like she needed to “divorce overwork,” her therapist told her to take that idea seriously. Joyel wrote an actual divorce decree dissolving her relationship with constant productivity.
In that decree, she named what the relationship had cost her: exhaustion, self-criticism, anxiety, guilt, burnout, and the belief that professional output was the measure of her worth. She also named what she wanted instead: rest, creativity, community, peace, pleasure, presence, and a life where her value was no longer conditional on what she produced.
“Work is what I do, not who I am. Rest, laughter, and stillness are equally productive. My value is intrinsic, not conditional.”
WHEN ASKING FOR HELP BECAME PART OF HER STRENGTH
Joyel had people around her, but she had spent so long being the person who handled things that she did not fully recognize how little she was actually asking for help. Even while stress, burnout, surgeries, and exhaustion were piling up, she was still trying to carry the weight mostly on her own.
It was at one of her lowest points that Joyel began reaching outward. She asked God for strength. She asked family and friends for help. She leaned on the people she now calls her board of directors, the people who could support her while she figured out what came next.
That experience changed how she understood strength. Asking did not mean she had failed to handle her life. It meant she had finally stopped treating support like something she should be able to live without.
“I did not know that I had not been asking for help. It was when I was at my weakest point in my soul that I realized I had to ask.”
WHEN HER LIFE GOT BIGGER THAN WORK
Joyel is learning to build a life that is not organized around productivity. That looks like reading books simply because she enjoys them, watching her favorite shows, dancing, spending time with friends, and returning to music. She joined two bands and started singing again after years of letting that part of herself sit quietly in the background.
She pays more attention now to what fills her up and what drains her. Even when something requires energy, she asks whether it leaves her feeling more alive afterward. The question is no longer only whether she can do something or whether it will move her career forward. She wants room for joy, community, creativity, and things that make her feel like herself again.
Part of that has meant returning to the parts of herself that work had pushed to the edges. Joyel talks about getting back to the little girl she once was, making room for fun again, and refusing to treat seriousness and exhaustion as proof that she is doing life correctly.
“You are enough. You do enough. You are worth taking care of yourself. Whatever you’ve done is
good enough.”
ABOUT JOYEL CRAWFORD
Joyel Crawford is a career coach, speaker, author, and founder of Crawford Leadership Strategies, where she helps people advocate for themselves, communicate more effectively, and build careers that do not require them to disappear inside the work. She also works with organizations on human-centered leadership and creating workplaces where people can stay engaged without sacrificing themselves in the process.
Her work is deeply connected to her own experience with burnout, overworking, and learning to separate her worth from her productivity. Joyel is the author of Show Your Ask, which centers using your voice to advocate for yourself, and her work continues to explore what it means to build a career without losing yourself along the way.
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