7 years ago, well before the pandemic, I went to Support Driven Summit in Belgrade to talk about remote work and support operations. Earlier this month, I went to the same conference in Amsterdam to talk about the importance of pre-mortems.

People who went to the first conference remembered me as “the lady with the tiara”. People who met me this time referred to me (with an involuntary hush in their words) as the “death lady”. The tiara is still there, but it’s less prominent. The tag line on the name badge did the ice-breaking this time.

The tiara used to be my calling card when there was no easy short hand for what I actually did. Customer Support, Product Management, Product Operations - in the SaaS ecosystem, those words can mean a million different things, and outside of SaaS they do not mean anything.

Death though? That hits a lot closer to home. Everyone has a vague idea about the logistics that come after someone dies. It’s not a sexy topic, and many people don’t want to engage with it, but they still know what it means.

Interestingly, that means I can spend less time explaining my work and more time on my other interests. That’s important because 1) people will remember me just by the tagline, and 2) we can use the rest of the conversation to figure out whether we like each other. Because whether you want to do it now or later, you definitely don’t want to work on your pre-mortem with someone you don’t like.

And that’s how a girl I met twice at bouldering signed up to run yet another Spartan race with my friends and me, in October. Because that’s what we talked about after the typical “so what do you do”-intro.

I still self-identify as a trail runner, NOT an OCR (obstacle course run) person, though. Measured in kms and time, I run a lot more than I climb or attempt monkey bars.

Your work identity is one of many labels. Or it should be one of many labels. Your hobbies can add more labels, so can your relational standpoint (if that’s important to you). Most labels are situation-dependent, not situation-exclusive.

For example, your work-identifying label might be the most salient one at a conference. Mixing in some additional labels gives more texture to your personality and makes it more likely that you’ll create a genuine connection with the other person. Depending on whom I am talking to, I like to weave in that I have twins, I run on trails, I have an obsession with Japanese green tea, and I am German. We may connect over my father’s brain cancer, or my alternative views of relationships, or over how to show up as a single mom in a world built for couples. None of these topics erase the reality of my work. Instead, these topics signal that I understand where you are coming from as a mother, or as someone comfortable suffering for hours on end to appease the Garmin Goddess.

Which labels come out very much depends on whom I am talking to. In a sense, we discover ourselves together. That’s why it can be so interesting to step out of your own echo chamber and have new conversations. Conferences are great for that, and so are long meandering conversations that allow for the time needed to figure out which label connects the two of us.

And sometimes they end up on the page of 101 things you probably didn’t know about me.

The renegotiation of labels is easy when you are the only one remembering your past labels. Every new person you meet allows you to refine your own story, with all its bends in the road, its wrong turns, its picnics and its muddy parts.

Then you meet someone you haven’t met in years, and suddenly there’s a disconnect. They have a clear idea of who you are and what you … did. Back then. And not everyone takes kindly to the fact that you have changed. I’ve been accused of being inauthentic because I decided to study Finance after all this time in Product Management and Operations. Someone told me I was “throwing out my entire career” as if learning something new would erase the accumulated knowledge of the past decades.

For some people, you changing is a threat. It reminds them that they could change if they wanted to. It upsets an equilibrium that used to be there, stale, yet stable. It’s an emotional reaction I’ve seen time and time again, at every major pivot in my life. Your job isn’t to use logic; your job is to create a narrative that works first and foremost for yourself. If you know that your next step is aligned with your journey, it is. And others pick up on that sooner than you think.

What’s your story? What’s your journey?

And now, some articles I’ve enjoyed this past week, as I refuse to accept that AI killed the art of writing.

“So when the next thing you write comes out flawless and frictionless and faintly familiar, stop, read it back, and ask the only question worth asking. Is there anyone in here? And if there is not, say it again, worse, in your own crooked, particular, unmistakable voice. Not the fake fingerprints, the planted typo, the en/em dash smuggled in to pass the test. Those are only the Void in disguise. The real ones, the marks you could not help leaving, because a person was actually here. That is the whole of it. In an age of infinite polish, the most radical thing you can do is leave the fingerprints in.”

A deep analysis of “flaw speak” and what happens when the reader leaves the room. And how to do better.

“And this is the real origin of slop. The posture the tool was designed to encourage. The people who most fully adopted the AI voice have internalised the tech-bro logic of generation at scale and make content engines, get things out quickly, fill the calendar, produce the volume. That is the slop. It’s produced by people who were capable and got seduced by the speed, and stopped bringing their ear, and stopped asking is this good and only asked is this out.”