Roots beneath the surface
(To share or not to share, that is the question)
“Winter is often a season of stillness, but it is also a season of roots growing beneath the surface.”
These words landed in my inbox on December 24th, and appropriately I didn’t read them until sometime later in January, when I had begun hibernating in earnest. They were the validation I needed to ‘excuse’ a 6 month break from public posting, brand-building or even attempting to wrangle my thoughts into coherent, written form.
Working in brand/marketing/content/media, I am constantly consuming other people’s ideas and reflections. It is very easy to get stuck in a one-way street of consumption, but it is also very hard not to absorb the conclusion that I too should be sharing constantly: sharing my ‘process’, building in public, turning my every struggle or triumph into a neat little package for Substack or LinkedIn or Instagram.
And yet for quite a while now, I have smothered every impulse to share anything.
As someone who centres a lot of my value around my opinion and perspective, this is a bit of a conundrum. Who am I if I’m not broadcasting thoughts about things? If I thought falls in the forest and there is no-one there to hear it, does it even matter? Is there any value to the unexpressed?
Then of course, the longer you go without expressing, the more the inertia builds, and the thicker that wall of resistance to push through to just. Get. Something. Out. There. For. God’s. Sake.
I’ve been wrestling with this resistance for weeks now.
If I look inward and examine the thing I’m desperately circling in the dance of avoidance, I see that it is about my identity: I no longer want to be who I was, publicly. That old persona feels like someone else. Maybe someone who barely even existed. The ‘B2B marketing consultant’ according to LinkedIn, which I tried on for a while, but never quite fit. I don’t want to post under an old photo, an old bio, an old headline—wearing an old disguise—but I’m not quite ready to update it either.
Everything I know about brand and branding says you need to be consistent. But I don’t feel consistent right now. I feel very inconsistent. I feel like I’m kinda, sorta approaching the thing that I want to be, but it’s not quite there yet.
I am in the messy middle. And messy doesn’t brand well (unless messy is your brand I suppose). Brands at their best are coherent. They can contain multitudes, but they have a golden thread that connects their output.
My identity is shifting. I want to step into a role that more fully ties my expression, my ideas, and my thoughts to my value proposition—to become a ‘thought leader’ in the true sense, though it cringes me out beyond all measure to use that label (something I should probably get over).
My ego likes to tie me in knots whenever it feels threatened by change. This is my current knot: In order to become someone known for their thinking, I need to express those thoughts, therefore I must express myself or I cannot become who I want to be, and if I don’t, then I am no one and nothing. And everything stays the same. And that is frustrating as hell, but it is safe.
So I have chosen silence. I have chosen safety and nothing.
And then my algorithm feeds me soothing wisdom from a gentle AI-generated monk:
And I think, ‘ah yes, see—I’m not hiding, I am a seed in the dark’.
And maybe that is true to an extent. But where is the line between protecting and hiding?
“Move quietly. Build in silence. Let your discipline be louder than your announcements. You don’t owe updates. You don’t need validation. You don’t need approval to become who you are meant to be. When the work is done, when the foundation is strong, when the results are real—you won’t need to explain anything.”
I love this advice because this has been my modus operandi my whole life. It’s what I want to hear. But is it what I need to hear?
At some point the work does need to be announced. It needs to leave the womb. Building a brand takes time, it takes consistency, it takes constancy. But above all a brand needs to be recognised and witnessed in order to exist. Silence is not a brand-building strategy.
So what is the middle ground?
“Transformation rarely happens in moments of visibility. It tends to unfold quietly, in transitions, in pauses, in the spaces between what was and what is still forming. These moments, though often overlooked, shape us most deeply. They allow us to recognise what no longer belongs to us and to sense, sometimes gently, sometimes painfully, what is beginning to take root.
This season offers a rare permission to listen more closely — not to the noise around us, but to what resonates within. To ask ourselves what we still believe in, what we want to protect, and what kind of future we are quietly preparing for.”
The lesson is to look to nature—to lean in closely and listen. Nature does not resist, it just is. There is a time for winter and a time for spring. The days are getting longer again, the temperature is slowly creeping up.
I can honour the need for invisibility: that I needed this silence, and that it served its purpose, whilst also honouring the need for it to come to an end. It will be painful, but all change is uncomfortable. I am ready for it.