The Career I Was Promised (?)
Part I
The Origin Story
If you’re reading this hoping for “10 Proven Strategies to 10x Your Career,” you should probably close the tab right now. This isn’t that. This is the story of how I tripped, danced, cursed, and occasionally cried my way into a career I was never properly warned about.
I started working young, well before I had a clear answer to the question everyone loves asking children: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I liked dancing, movies, music - anything with a little performance involved. Turning those interests into a sensible career plan was apparently going to require further discussion.
In high school, I joined the ACE program, which gave me the chance to work at three different places. One of them was the Pan Pacific Vancouver, where part of my education involved working in the housekeeping department and learning to behave normally when Michael Bublé walked past.
Apparently, you’re supposed to just ignore him. No musical number. No meaningful glance suggesting he might discover you. Just carry on with your duties like a person who regularly encounters Michael Bublé.
Then Harrison Ford appeared, which felt excessive. I was still in high school. Surely there should have been a prerequisite before I was expected to act normal around Indiana Jones (...and don’t call me Shirley).
Between a childhood spent dancing and an introduction to work that included occasional celebrity cameos, you can understand how I might have developed some unrealistic expectations. I didn’t know exactly where I was headed, but the opening scenes were promising.
Childhood overall? Honestly - it rocked. And like a lot of people in my generation, I’m grateful I grew up when I did. Social media wasn’t there asking me to turn every interest into an identity or every experience into something worth posting. I could love something without figuring out how to package it. Dancing could just be dancing. Nobody needed a content strategy.
I had interests, opportunities, and plenty of time to imagine what my life might look like. Eventually, I was going to have to choose a direction. But at that point, I had every reason to think there was something good ahead.
Tone set? Good. Sarcastic, girly, calm-with-a-touch-of-chaos… you’ve been warned.
Who I Was Before the Job
Here’s the truth: I never really knew what I wanted to “be.” Some kids dream about being astronauts, others declare themselves future doctors at age seven. I mostly wanted to dance. Dancing shaped me in ways I’m still unpacking, but mostly, it gave me joy - and I’ve been chasing little jolts of joy ever since.
Movies also owned me. I still remember taking acting classes with my childhood best friend. The highlight? Getting assigned a monologue from Now and Then. I didn’t pick it. Nobody picked their own - we were all just kids being force-fed ‘90s coming-of-age wisdom. But I was in heaven. To this day, I can recite entire films word-for-word like a very niche party trick. Imagine quoting the entire script of Clueless without blinking - yes, that’s me.
If you’re seeing the pattern here - music, movies, drama, performance - you’d think my career path was obvious. Spoiler: it wasn’t.
The Break-In
Boy, was it ever a break-in. Nothing about my path was straightforward. By the time I graduated high school, I didn’t have some grand vision for my career. I mostly thought, “Well, time to get a job”. I hated school. I did what I needed to do to get through it and moved on. There was no five-year plan tucked into my graduation gown.
Work felt like the obvious next step. I’d already started doing it, and I was ready to see what else was out there. The finer details of what I was actually working toward could apparently be sorted out along the way.
Did I always know what I was doing? No. Did that stop me from showing up, smiling like I knew the plan, and pretending everything was fine? Also no. Somewhere between confidence and chaos is where I tend to live.
And so began my "career".
Part II
Climbing the Wrong (and Right) Ladders
The First Big Lessons
Ah yes, the first year of “real” work. You think you’re about to conquer the world in heels and a fresh blazer, and then - bam - you get laid off.
Here’s the scene: I had just graduated from the Art Institute, diploma in Event Management in hand, with honours. Because apparently I’m good at colour-coding itineraries and convincing people to show up on time. I thought that piece of paper meant the universe would roll out a red carpet and whisper: “Here’s your dream job, queen.”
Instead? I got my first big “you’re done here” within a year. Actually, three months. I landed the job my entire graduating class had been going after, worked there for three months, and then the CEO decided he wanted to retire. Everyone lost their jobs.
I had barely started my career and was already being asked to figure out what came next. Apparently, landing the job was only one part of the assignment. The company continuing to exist was another.
But this was also where I met the first of a few women I still think about with an enormous amount of admiration. My own occasional cast of Disney princesses, appearing at particularly inconvenient plot points. This one reached out her hand and connected me with the right person. Less than a month later, I was at my next job.
No woodland creatures involved. Just a woman who took the time to help me when I needed it. To this day, I haven’t forgotten.
First lesson: a fancy credential does not mean anyone is going to care about you at 9 a.m. on a Monday when they’ve decided your job no longer exists.
Second lesson: you can do everything right, get the job everyone wanted, and still find yourself out of work three months later. I hadn’t even had time to become a cautionary tale.
Third lesson: remember the people who reach back for you. She probably couldn’t have known how much that introduction would mean to me. I’m still writing about it.
Bosses, Coworkers, and Characters
There were always people around me. Bosses, coworkers, mentors, the occasional character who made an otherwise ordinary Tuesday considerably more interesting. I learned from plenty of them. But when I look back at my career, I don't remember anyone handing me a roadmap. Nobody was steering me toward a particular role or telling me what my next move should be. The decisions were mine, for better or worse.
That doesn't mean I did everything alone. Some of the best lessons came from the people working alongside me, often in conversations that had very little to do with the actual job. You learn to pay attention. Sometimes a little workplace gossip is just gossip. Sometimes it's a tip about how things really work, delivered by someone who knows better than to put it in an email.
And then there were the people who seemed perfectly happy to have me around until I made a decision they wouldn't have made for me.
I think some people mistook proximity for influence. We learned from each other, shared interests, sometimes followed similar paths, and somewhere along the way, they decided they had me figured out. That I thought the way they thought. That I'd do what they did.
But learning from someone isn't the same as following them. I was always in the driver's seat.
So when I made a move that didn't fit their understanding of who I was, I noticed the shift. The distance. The change in energy. It turns out some people are comfortable with you as long as you remain the person they've decided you are.
Some of those people are no longer around. Did me a favour, probably.
The Work Was Never Just the Work
On paper, some of my career moments look like shiny gold stars. Behind the scenes? Absolute circus.
Take the Pemberton Music Festival. I worked for a catering company that occasionally took on some pretty unusual contracts. One of those contracts landed me in the campgrounds at a music festival, running the general store.
The vibe: mountains, music, magic. The reality: 24 straight hours of trying to get a POS system to connect to the mothership while bosses shot daggers at me. Nothing screams career highlight like watching your supervisor glare at you because Wi-Fi hates you.
And then there was the rumour. A young man had reportedly been stomped to death in his tent on the final night of the festival. People found him the following morning.
It was dark, rainy, and grey. The campsite looked like a literal war zone, and police had blocked off part of the grounds. My team couldn't get out of there fast enough. I didn't know the young man or the full story. There wasn't much time to process any of it. Kids were still coming into the general store, and all I could do was help the people standing in front of me.
It's strange what you remember about a day like that. The atmosphere. The confusion. The feeling that something awful had happened just beyond the little bubble of your own responsibilities, while the day carried on around you.
And yet, even in the darkest moments, comedy finds you.
The morning after the last night of the festival brought a parade of walking, talking evidence that the previous night had gotten out of hand. One guy asked me for Plan B, like we were a pharmacy. Another staggered in looking like the ghost of bad decisions, asking for a Magnum. The condom, not the ice cream bar, though arguably both would've helped.
In retrospect, it's telling that the festival characters I remember most vividly are the ones who made their sex lives my business. Two festival stories, and apparently that's my takeaway. Career-defining experiences, everyone.
The cherry on top? After a completely different event where I forgot my will to live again, my bosses rewarded me with a Holt Renfrew gift card. Like I was going to trot down to buy a $900 sweater after everything this line of work could throw at a person. I laughed, handed it back, and told them I preferred Costco.
Some would call that unprofessional. I call it priorities.
But ridiculous stories aren't the only things you take home from a job. Sometimes an experience stays with you for reasons that have nothing to do with the funny bits, the long hours, or whatever you can put on a résumé. Sometimes it's a moment involving another person that you carry with you long after the contract ends.
The glamorous events that smell like sweat and desperation. The long hours, the bad bosses, the situations you couldn't possibly have prepared for. The experiences that don't fit neatly into a LinkedIn update.
Half the career wins are chaos with lipstick on. And sometimes, the parts that stay with you aren't wins at all.
Part III
The Turning Points
The Oh-No Moments
Every career has its turning points. The moments that make you question every decision that led you to where you are. The moments when you wonder if you’ve somehow managed to fuck up your entire future, and whether living in your parents’ basement is still a viable long-term plan.
I had a few of those.
After the catering job went sideways, I could have spent a lot more time being angry about how it ended. But I wasn't about to give them any more of my time. They'd had enough of that already.
So, on to the next disaster.
Enter: the tech bros. You know the type. Patagonia vest. Too much gel. Calls himself a founder because he bought a domain once. Speaks almost exclusively in buzzwords and somehow manages to turn a conversation about office printers into a discussion about disruption, scalability, and the future of humanity.
It's a printer, Trevor. It prints things.
I didn't know it at the time, but working around these guys would teach me some pretty important lessons about work, power, and the difference between being good at your job and being very good at convincing everyone you're important.
Because here's the thing about confidence: it's not the same as competence. And having a fancy title, a LinkedIn following, and/or a podcast mic doesn't automatically make you a visionary.
What I wanted was pretty simple. To do good work, be treated with respect, and work with people who understood that other people's time and contributions mattered, too. What I encountered was a culture where respect could feel conditional, where fitting in sometimes seemed more important than doing the actual work, and where being one of the guys came with its own set of unwritten rules.
For a while, I wondered if I was the problem. Maybe I wasn't cut out for tech. Maybe I didn't have the right personality. Maybe I needed to be louder, more confident, or better at pretending that every half-baked idea was going to revolutionize an industry.
Or maybe - and hear me out - the problem wasn't that I didn't fit in. Maybe I just wasn't interested in playing along.
That distinction would end up mattering a lot more than I realized.
The Moves That Mattered
Now, not every turning point was a disaster. Some were… setups from the universe. Or, at the very least, opportunities with a spectacularly questionable ending.
Take Wavefront. That job took me from Vancouver to Toronto. Not because someone tapped me on the shoulder and handed me my dream career, but because I asked. I saw an opportunity, put myself forward, and made a move that would change the direction of my working life.
I started as a receptionist. Then, somehow, I found my way into the marketing department. A whole new world opened up, and suddenly I was learning things I hadn't gone to school for, doing work I hadn't originally been hired to do, and figuring out that maybe I was capable of a lot more than the job title on my business card suggested.
And then there was my second Disney princess.
She helped me navigate the transition from admin to marketing, and reminded me how much a little guidance at the right moment can matter.
Which leads me to my favourite career advice: find the women.
Find the woman who answers your questions without making you feel stupid. The one who gives you a chance before you have the experience to prove you deserve it. The one who tells you the truth, shares what she's learned, and reminds you that you're not imagining things when the room starts making you question yourself.
They're not always your boss. They're not always the loudest person in the room. Sometimes they're the person who quietly helps you figure out your next move.
Of course, Wavefront had one final plot twist. Six months after I moved to Toronto for the job, I got laid off.
Six Months.
Apparently, relocating across the country was all part of the professional development package. Just kidding. There was no package.
But here's the thing: getting let go didn't undo what I'd learned, the career I'd started building, or the person who'd helped me get there. The job ended. The experience stayed.
And so did the lesson: sometimes the opportunity matters, even when the company turns out not to be worth the trouble.
When Work Meets Life
Let's talk about what happens when work doesn't just collide with your personal life. It pile-drives it into the ground.
By the time I reached this chapter, things were shifting. I was established as a Technology Project Manager at Green Circle Salons, and I was building something of my own on the side. I'd officially launched my shop, started posting about it on Instagram, and was finding a new identity for Johanna Jean online.
Jo's Notepad and I Will Be Right With You were taking shape. And eventually, Stratty my AI assistant would enter the picture, because apparently having one project during a career crisis wasn't enough.
From the outside, these were creative projects. Things I was excited about. Things I could build, experiment with, and make my own.
But underneath all that, something wasn't right.
I started noticing things around me that I couldn't quite explain. Conversations, comments, questions people asked me - things that seemed to connect to whatever strange feeling I was experiencing at the time. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it felt as though everything was somehow related.
I don't remember every conversation or exactly what was said during that period. What I do remember is how strange it all felt, and that sometimes it was genuinely scary. I was trying to make sense of things I couldn't explain while my professional life was becoming increasingly uncertain.
And there was something else I hadn't fully accounted for: grief.
Over the course of three years, I'd lost several family members. One loss was followed by another, and before I'd really had the chance to process one, I was dealing with the next. I was carrying a lot more than I realized, even as I continued showing up for work, making plans, and trying to build something for myself.
I'd spent so long pushing through, figuring things out, taking on more, and trying to prove I could handle whatever came my way that I hadn't stopped to consider what it was costing me.
I thought I needed to figure out my next move. Build something new. Find a way forward.
Instead, my time at Green Circle came to an end, bringing another major change to a period of my life that already felt unsettled.
Looking back, I can see how much I was trying to carry at once. I was dealing with grief I hadn't fully processed, struggling to understand what I was experiencing, and facing the loss of a career I'd invested so much of myself in.
I didn't have the perspective to make sense of all of it then. I just knew that things weren't right, and that I couldn't keep moving forward as though nothing was happening.
It was around this time that I started to understand that what I was experiencing had a name. Burnout. Not just being tired or needing a break, but the result of spending so long pushing through that I'd lost sight of what I actually needed.
Because burnout isn't a badge of honour. It isn't proof that you're ambitious, dedicated, or better at handling pressure than everyone else. Sometimes it's a sign that you've been running on empty for so long that you no longer recognize empty as a problem.
And I was about to learn just how far I'd pushed myself past that point.
Part IV
Owning It
Making It Up as I Go
There's this funny thing about becoming an expert. It doesn't happen the day you get a certificate, or the day your boss finally spells your name right in an email.
For me? It started when I began making reels on Instagram.
No joke. The same app where teenagers lip-sync to Taylor Swift became the place where I started experimenting with ideas, explaining things I'd learned, making fun of things I'd experienced, and figuring out what I actually wanted to say.
I wasn't building some massive audience. I wasn't going viral or collecting brand deals. The algorithm and I were, and continue to be, in a complicated relationship.
But something was changing.
I started seeing how much of my career I could bring into the things I was creating. Years of marketing, project management, figuring things out on the fly, getting people on the same page, and trying to make complicated things make sense had given me more to work with than I'd realized.
I could take an idea and turn it into something. I could tell a story, make a point, experiment with a new tool, or create something that made me laugh. I could put it out into the world without waiting for someone to assign me the project or approve the final draft.
And that was the point.
I didn't need a huge audience to start acting like the person I wanted to become. I needed to start doing the work, learn as I went, and make things I was proud to put my name on.
Turns out, you don't have to be the expert in the room to have something worth sharing.
Sometimes you just have to stop waiting for an invitation.
Mario Kart Career Strategy
If I had to describe my career in one image, it would be me in a Mario Kart race. Total chaos. Banana peels flying, Bowser breathing down my neck, and somehow - somehow - I'm still in the game.
There were so many times I felt like I was winging it. Like Baby Peach suddenly zooming ahead in a pink convertible. No idea how I got there. Just vibes.
I spent years walking into situations I'd never dealt with before, figuring things out as I went, and hoping nobody noticed I was occasionally making it up five minutes before the meeting.
Case in point: someone once asked me a question in a meeting about a system I'd literally Googled the night before. I delivered the answer with the confidence of a TED Talk in heels. They nodded, impressed. Inside? I was panicking. Outside? Calm, cool, collected.
But here's what I've come to realize: I wasn't necessarily faking it. I was learning. I was researching, connecting the dots, applying what I already knew, and figuring out how to make it work.
The confidence didn't always arrive before the opportunity. Sometimes it showed up halfway through the meeting, wearing a pink princess dress and hoping for the best.
And honestly? That's how I've learned a lot of things.
You don't need to know everything before you start. You need to be willing to learn, ask questions, adapt, and figure out the next move when the track inevitably takes a turn you weren't expecting.
I'm still racing. I'm just getting a little better at handling the banana peels.
What I Wish I Knew
Here's a myth we can throw out immediately: that women like me have things handed to them and everything is easy for me.
Nope. Not true. Not funny. And definitely not my story.
I worked. I learned. I failed. I cried in bathrooms. I carried the damn cactus out of the office. I kept showing up, even when I wasn't entirely sure what I was showing up for anymore.
That's the truth.
What I wish I'd known earlier is that you don't have to play every game by someone else's rules. You don't have to earn your place by making yourself smaller, stay somewhere just because you've already invested years of your life there, or confuse being good at your job with being willing to put up with absolutely anything.
Sometimes success looks like a promotion. Sometimes it looks like leaving. Sometimes it looks like starting over, trying something completely different, or finally admitting that the path you spent years building isn't the one you want to keep following.
And sometimes it looks like laughing in someone's face when they hand you a Holt Renfrew gift card after trauma. Still iconic.
I spent a long time thinking the next move had to make sense to everyone else. Now I'm more interested in whether it makes sense to me.
I'm still figuring it out. I'm still making things, learning new skills, trying ideas, and occasionally wondering what the hell I'm doing.
The difference is that I'm no longer waiting for someone else to tell me what I'm allowed to do next.
Advice You Didn't Ask For (But Need Anyway)
Since we're here, let me leave you with a few things I've picked up along the way.
Find the women. Always. They might change your career. They might change your life. At the very least, they'll tell you when you're not the problem.
Boundaries are hot. Burnout is not. Being the person who can handle everything is a terrible long-term career strategy.
Your job title is not your identity. Neither is your LinkedIn headline, your follower count, or how many people think you're impressive.
Create like the audience is already there. Make the thing. Publish the thing. Learn from the thing. The algorithm can catch up whenever it feels like it.
If it feels like Mario Kart, you're probably doing it right. Everyone's racing, someone's throwing shells, nobody seems to know where the track is going, and just when you think you've got it figured out, someone takes the shortcut. Keep driving.
And for the love of all things holy, drink some water.
You're welcome.
Part V – Looking Back, Looking Forward
The Full-Circle Moment
It wasn’t a corner office. It wasn’t a promotion. It wasn’t even a glamorous gig.
My real full-circle moment happened when my burnout landed me in the hospital.
I had no choice but to stop, rest, and take stock of the chaos I’d been calling a career. I don’t need to revisit every detail of that experience to know it changed how I looked at my life.
For years, I'd treated every setback as something to recover from quickly. Another job ended? Find another one. Another disappointment? Pick yourself up. Another situation that made me question everything? Figure it out and keep moving.
And I did. Over and over again.
I went from landing the job everyone in my graduating class wanted to watching workplaces close their doors. I left stability for opportunities that didn't turn out the way I'd hoped. I moved across the country for a job, built a career in marketing and technology, and kept finding new ways to make things work. I found people who championed me, and I found people who made me question whether I belonged in the room at all.
Somewhere along the way, I became very good at starting over.
Maybe a little too good.
Because when you're used to being the person who figures things out, it's easy to mistake your ability to survive a situation for a reason to stay in it. You get so busy proving you can handle the next thing that you forget to ask whether you should have to handle it in the first place.
Looking back, I can see how much of my career was spent adapting. Learning new roles, navigating different personalities, picking up skills I hadn't expected to need, and trying to find my footing in places that didn't always make it easy.
There were some wonderful people along the way. Women who saw something in me before I fully saw it in myself. Colleagues who made the hard days easier. Experiences that taught me what I was good at, what I cared about, and what I never wanted to repeat.
The hospital didn't magically give me all the answers. I didn't emerge with a five-year plan, a new job title, or a perfectly curated vision of my future.
But it gave me a reason to stop treating my own limits like another obstacle to overcome.
And that changed the question.
Instead of asking, How do I get back to where I was? I started asking, What do I actually want my life to look like now?
I didn't have the answer immediately. I still don't have every answer.
But I started creating again. I started experimenting with ideas that didn't need a job description or anyone else's approval. I began building things because I wanted to see what I could make, what I could learn, and what might happen if I gave myself permission to try.
Maybe that's the full-circle moment.
Not that everything I'd been through suddenly made sense. Not that every awful boss or disappointing ending was secretly a gift.
But that I could finally look at the career I'd spent years building, acknowledge what it had given me and what it had cost me, and decide that the next chapter didn't have to look like the last one.
Where the Story Goes From Here
So, what’s next?
I’m looking for my next project management role. I know what I bring to the table, I know the kind of work I enjoy, and I’m hopeful there’s a team out there where it all clicks. In the meantime, I’m continuing to build Johanna Jean, create things, experiment with ideas, and see where they lead.
I don’t have a perfectly mapped-out plan. I have experience, a few projects, plenty to learn, and a better understanding of what I want my life to look like. That feels like a reasonable place to start.
I used to think a career was supposed to follow a particular path. Get the right education, land the right job, work your way up, and eventually arrive at some version of success that makes all the effort worthwhile.
My career didn't exactly follow that script.
But maybe the point isn't to get back on the path you thought you were supposed to be on. Maybe it's to figure out which parts are still worth pursuing, which parts you're ready to leave behind, and what you want to build for yourself.
You don’t need the career you were promised. You need the one you create.
Everything else? That’s just bonus material.
Oh, and if you're wondering where dance, movies, television and all that jazz fits into my life now... they're still here. Always will be. Sometimes life gets a little too loud, and there's nothing better than disappearing into a movie or getting completely absorbed in a new series. A little escapism never hurt anyone.
Sometimes, it's just nice to enjoy the show.
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