After years of career success, I began questioning why the work and experiences I once loved no longer felt right. It took me years to understand what those moments of discomfort were telling me about myself.
The moment really was not one moment. It is the same moment getting repeated day over day over day, and it went like this.
I would wake up in the morning, get ready, put on my jacket and my work clothes, and show up at work. I would walk into these massively tall, flashy buildings in the heart of New York City, the financial capital of the world. I was rushing in with all the other professionals, intellectuals, financial wizards, and traders, all of us entering the elevator bank, scrambling to find the next elevator to take us 40 or 50 floors up to our desks.
I would go through the turnstiles, enter through the glass doors with my coffee in my hand, and go and sit at my desk. The recurring thought in my mind was: what am I doing? What am I doing with my life? Why am I here? That's in the back of my mind, obviously. I'm focused on the day, I'm focused on the next meeting, and I'm focused on what I am supposed to do and deliver that day for my work.
While I would show up professionally for every single meeting, I was feeling very disconnected from the people around me because I'm looking at them and I'm like, "What am I doing here? What do I have in common with the people here?"
It was never about the people
I liked the people individually. Some of these people were my friends, and some of these people were my confidants. I had confided in some of them and gotten advice from them on my career. The voice in my head was not passing judgment on a single person on that floor.
By the way, this thought was also not new. The very first time this voice spoke in my head, it was at another workplace, at another company. At the time, I thought it was the people in this company that I did not have anything in common with, and I had to change my company and my job. I changed my company and my job, and that same thought came back, but bigger and louder.
After changing my company, my job, my location, and my work profile, the same thought came up in my head: "I have nothing in common with these people." Actually, that's when I began to understand what was happening. This voice in my head is telling me that this path is not for me.
But even that understanding didn't come all at once. It was something I came to recognize over several years.
When something I once loved no longer felt right
There was a phase in my life when I absolutely loved going out for team lunches and drinks. I looked forward to them. I thrived in that culture. I enjoyed the people, the conversations, and the opportunity to socialize with my colleagues.
Which is why my reaction years later was so strange to me.
A colleague would invite me to lunch, and in my head I would think, "What will I do at the lunch?" So I would skip it. Then someone would say, "Oh, we're meeting for drinks later tonight. Join us." And again, my immediate thought was, "No, what will I do at the drinks?"
People noticed. Some were offended. And when they asked why I hadn't shown up, I honestly did not have an answer.
The following week, a friend at work asked why I had missed the team drinks. She said, "That was such an important team drinks, and you could have networked with the senior executives."
She had a point. There was a time when I would have looked forward to that evening. But on that particular day, everything in my body screamed that I should not go. I honestly did not have an answer for why I felt that way.
And that became one of the biggest red flags for me.
How was it that something I had once enjoyed so much, something I had been so comfortable doing, now felt so uncomfortable?
Something had changed in me.
I began to realize that what was right for me ten years ago was no longer necessarily right for me today. I was evolving, and my discomfort was telling me something that I needed to pay attention to.
I could not keep ignoring it and treating it as the status quo.
Climbing was not the answer, and that left a harder question
A lot of these accumulated moments made me realize that the path I was going down was not going to be it. It made one thing very clear for me: rising to the higher echelons, continuing to climb the corporate ladder, was not the answer for me. That became very clear to me: the difficult question actually was "What next, then? If not this, then what?" That was the journey that started the journey back to myself.
My whole journey, coming out of my midlife crisis, started with one question. Why am I not happy?
I was seemingly successful. I was checking all the boxes in terms of my lifestyle and where I thought I wanted to be. All of that was seemingly okay. Yet I was very unhappy.
The journey, on the surface, seemed like, "Okay, if I change my job, I will be happy. If I do this, I will be happy. If I do that, I will be happy," only to realize it was not getting me to be happy.
The aha moment did not do what I expected
I had heard so many stories of people having aha moments. They make a change in their life, and in a few months they get to that place of being happy. That has not been the case with me, and it has taken me a few years to arrive at a point and to get to a clear understanding of what this journey was all about.
After I quit my job and I decided I'm going to start my own business, I thought I would be happy. The motivation to start making changes and taking action was not happening as fast as I thought it should have happened.
That gap between deciding and doing is the part nobody tells you about. Leaving was the visible move, and it was the easier one. What came after it had no deadline attached, no one waiting on the deliverable, and no quarterly review to force the pace. It took years, not months.
What I was actually looking for was fulfillment
I had started to understand happiness as an emotion that could come and go. I could do things that made me happy for a while. But what I was really seeking was fulfillment, and I could not find that while I was disconnected from who I was. That journey is unique to every single person.
A kid can be happy because they get a piece of cake, and someone can just be happy seeing a nice view at the end of a long hiking day. Moments of happiness can come and go, but they weren't giving me the fulfillment I was looking for.
This is where the journey changed names for me. It started as a journey to happiness. It turned out to be a journey back to myself.
Success is a parameter you set for yourself
Success for each person is different. What is success? Success is a subjective parameter that each person defines for themselves, which is why, in my case, I was successful in other people's eyes, but I was not successful in my own eyes because my own definition of success had changed.
On paper the record was clean. 25 years, the titles, the moves that looked like the right moves from the outside. If you had reviewed the career of Charu Aggarwal at that point you would have signed off on it too.
But I was the one person who knew the numbers did not add up.
For me, success had to include being true to myself and the life I wanted to live.
Where to look if you are dissatisfied
My point here is: if you are dissatisfied with your life, pause and take a look. Examine where you are not being authentic to your true self:
- Where have you let other people's opinion take over your life?
- Where have you given up your agency?
- Where have you given up your own authenticity?
- Where do you need to get back in alignment with your true self?
Choose one of those four questions and apply it to one decision you made this past week. Maybe a meeting where you did not say what you wanted to say, or a commitment you accepted because you were worried about someone's opinion.
Write down what you would have done if nobody's opinion of you had been at stake.
Why the way back takes as long as it does
The more opinions you have accumulated on yourself, the more conditioning you have gone through, the longer that journey can be. Which is why, even after I understood what my own parameters of success actually were, it still took me a while to get back to myself.
For years I walked into that lobby with my coffee, asking what am I doing with my life, and treating it as a question about the job. The job was part of it, but changing jobs had not changed the question.
The question worth asking was: Where am I not being myself?
