Someone asks what you do at a party and the pause before you answer tells the whole story. Not a long pause. Maybe half a second. But it's there, and you feel it, this tiny gap where the old answer used to live. I'm a Strategy Director. Simple, clean, understood. People nod. They know what that is, or they think they do, which is the same thing at a party. The conversation moves on. You get to be a person with a title, which in London in your late thirties means you get to be a person, full stop.
I don't have that answer anymore. I have a collection of half-answers that are all true and none of them sufficient. I'm between roles. I'm building products. I'm figuring out what's next. I used to run strategy at agencies. Each one is accurate. None of them lands the way "Strategy Director" used to land. There is no nod. There is a follow-up question, and the follow-up question requires a longer answer than anyone at a party wants to hear.
This is the gap. Not unemployment, not a sabbatical, not a career break - though it contains elements of all three. It is the space between who you were and who you are becoming, and the honest truth is that you don't know what the second thing is yet. You have strong suspicions. You have evidence. You have fourteen products with URLs that prove you can make things. But you don't have a title, and titles are the currency of professional identity in a way that is both completely superficial and completely real.
The identity problem
Fifteen years in advertising gives you an identity whether you want one or not. You're an agency person. You understand briefs and decks and pitches and the particular rhythm of a Tuesday status meeting. You know what a tissue session is. You have opinions about brand positioning frameworks. You've presented to rooms full of clients who didn't want to be there and somehow made them care, at least temporarily. This identity sits on you like a coat. Comfortable. Familiar. Warm enough.
When you take the coat off, you feel the cold immediately. Not the cold of failure - the cold of formlessness. You're a person without a container. Your LinkedIn says "open to opportunities" which is the professional equivalent of standing in the middle of a field with your arms outstretched. It communicates availability and absolutely nothing else.
I updated my LinkedIn profile four times in the first month. Strategy Director. Independent strategist. Product builder. Strategist and maker. Each version felt like a costume I was trying on in a changing room, turning in front of the mirror, not quite convinced. The problem wasn't that none of them fit. The problem was that the thing I was becoming didn't have a name yet, and I kept trying to borrow names from things that already existed.
The freedom nobody mentions
Here is the thing about the gap that nobody talks about, possibly because it sounds ungrateful or naive: it is also the most creatively free period of my life. When you are a Strategy Director at an agency, your creativity is directed. It flows through the channel of the brief, the client, the brand, the budget, the timeline. You are creative within constraints that someone else has defined. This is fine. This is how agencies work. Some of the best work happens inside tight constraints.
But in the gap, there are no constraints except the ones you choose. I built a Japanese restaurant guide for London because I love Japanese food and thought the existing guides were lacking personality. I built a 70s retail store image generator because the aesthetic delighted me and I wanted to see if others felt the same. I built a taste-scoring system for brands because I have spent fifteen years thinking about what makes brands resonate and I wanted to make that thinking tangible. Nobody briefed me. Nobody approved it. Nobody scheduled a review meeting. I just made things, for the first time in my career, entirely on my own terms.
The products I have built in the gap are better than anything I produced in fifteen years of agency life. Not because agencies are bad - I loved agency life, and I was good at it. But because when you remove the distance between the idea and the execution, when the person who has the insight is the same person who builds the product, something happens that no amount of briefing and handover and collaboration can replicate. The vision stays intact. The taste stays consistent. The thing you imagined is the thing that exists.
What I tell myself at 2am
There are nights when the gap feels like falling. When the lack of structure, the absence of a team, the silence of not having a Monday morning to report to, feels less like freedom and more like drift. When you scroll LinkedIn and everyone seems to be announcing a new role, a promotion, a "thrilled to share" moment, and you are sitting in your kitchen in North London with a hot chocolate and a terminal window and nothing to announce except another product that might not matter to anyone.
On those nights, I open the portfolio. Not to admire it - to remind myself that the gap is not empty. That every week in this space has produced something. That the body of work is growing in a way that it never grew when I had a title and a salary and a clear answer for parties. That the gap, uncomfortable as it is, has been the most productive period of my professional life by a significant margin.
I don't know how the gap ends. I don't know if it ends with a job title I recognise or one that doesn't exist yet. I don't know if someone hires me because of the strategy experience or because of the products or because of some combination that we haven't figured out how to name. What I know is that I'm not drifting. I'm building. The gap has a direction, even if it doesn't have a destination. And the next time someone asks me what I do at a party, I'm going to skip the half-second pause and just say: I make things. Come have a look.
