I sat in my car in the parking garage for twenty minutes after the meeting, engine off, badge already collected, a cardboard box of picture frames and a coffee mug on the passenger seat like evidence from a crime scene. Fifteen years, and the last conversation lasted six minutes. Somewhere in there I remember thinking, absurdly, that I didn't know how to introduce myself anymore at a dinner party, because the first thing people ask is what you do, and I no longer had an answer that fit on a business card.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to notice how much of my sense of worth had quietly relocated into that title, how the job had become less a thing I did and more a thing I was. Genesis says God made humanity in his own image before anyone had accomplished a single task, before the garden was tended or a word was spoken, and that has been sitting with me differently this week than it ever did in a sermon. The image comes first. The doing comes after, and was always meant to flow from the image rather than build it. I wish I could say I fully believe that in my body and not just in my head, because there is still a small ache in the mornings when I open my laptop and there is nowhere to send it.

I don't have this resolved. Some days the identity shift feels like freedom and other days it feels like grief wearing freedom's clothes. But I keep returning to the thought that whoever made me did so before I was useful to anyone, and that has to be worth something.

I am learning to let that be enough for tonight.