On losing a title, grieving a chosen ending, and finding a life beyond the identity I had built for 30 years
For most of my career, I did not think twice about it. “Sir” was just how people addressed me in the hallway, in meetings, at the start of an email when they needed something approved.
Sir, may I ask something?
Sir, we need your decision.
Sir, the presentation is ready.
I heard it so often for so long that I stopped hearing it at all. It was respect, it was habit, it was a marker of where I sat in the org chart. I did not think about what the word meant. I just answered to it, the way you answer to your own name.
Then one day, it was gone.
And it took me a while to notice what had actually happened. “Sir” was not just how people spoke to me. Somewhere along the way it became one of the ways I knew who I was.
When the World I Knew Started Moving Without Me
I spent 30 years in international media, most of it with ABS-CBN Global and The Filipino Channel. By then, I understood that world the way you understand a house you grew up in. I knew television. I knew audiences, especially the Filipino diaspora audience, their homesickness, their humor, what made them tune in and what made them switch off. I knew how to build content, run a creative team, get a show out the door.
But the industry was changing under my feet. Everyone kept saying “digital transformation” like it was a destination we would eventually arrive at, when really it was already the ground we were standing on. New platforms, new habits, new ways audiences found and consumed stories. I felt the gap between what I knew and what the company now needed growing wider every year.
Some of that was on me, if I am honest. I had gotten good, maybe too good, at the media world I already understood. There is a comfort in expertise that makes you resist the next thing, even when you can see it coming.
I told myself it was about the learning curve. New tools, new systems, new vocabulary. But underneath that was something less flattering. If the thing I was good at no longer mattered as much, what did that make me?
I did not handle that gracefully. I hesitated. I held on longer than I probably should have. There were stretches where I genuinely could not tell if the industry was moving too fast, or if I had simply stopped moving with it.
That was not a comfortable thing to sit with. But it turned out to be necessary.
The Year the Math Changed
In 2020, I lost both of my parents.
They had been a big part of why I worked as hard as I did for as long as I did. Supporting them, making sure they were comfortable, giving them a life they deserved after everything they had given me, that was never separate from my career ambitions. It was woven into them.
After they were gone, I still had bills. That part did not change. But something else did.
I was now working mostly for myself. And that meant I no longer had to stay in a life that did not fit me anymore just to keep a paycheck at a certain level.
That was a hard thing to admit, even to myself. For decades I had believed that staying was the responsible thing to do, and that leaving would be reckless, maybe even a little ungrateful given how good I had it. I had a title people respected, a stable income, a seat at the table.
And still, I could not picture myself doing this job the same way until 60, which was the retirement age everyone around me assumed I would hit.
The question stopped being, “Can I afford to leave?”
It became something closer to: how much more of this life was I willing to trade for the feeling of being safe. And, if I stayed, what was I quietly giving up to keep that feeling.
The Decision
On December 31, 2023, I closed the door on 30 years in international media.
People congratulated me. Early retirement sounds like a win from the outside. Freedom, finally. Time to write, to travel, to do the things you kept postponing because work always came first.
I wanted to feel that way too. Some days I did.
But in the months after, I found myself second-guessing the whole thing more than I expected to.
Did I leave too early? Was I mistaking exhaustion for clarity? Should I have gutted it out a few more years? Could I still walk it back if this turned out to be a mistake?
I had chosen this. Nobody pushed me out. And yet choosing a loss does not make it hurt any less than a loss that happens to you.
There were mornings I genuinely missed the structure of it. The rhythm of a workday. Having a team that needed me and that I needed back. Knowing, without having to think about it, what was expected of me that day. Being part of something bigger and older than I was.
Mostly, though, I think I missed knowing who I was without having to explain it.
Thirty years inside one organization gives you more than a paycheck. It gives you a place to stand, a set of relationships, a sense of authority that you stop noticing because it is just there, like air.
Then it wasn't. No office. No team waiting on a decision from me. No title walking into the room a half second before I did.
Nobody called me “Sir” anymore.
Nobody called me “Sir” anymore.
The silence after a professional identity
Grief That Doesn't Look Like Grief
I went looking online for some kind of explanation for what I was feeling, half expecting to find nothing useful.
That was where I first ran into the term “disenfranchised grief.” It describes loss that is real to the person feeling it, but that the people around them do not always recognize as something worth grieving.
Retirement grief fits that description more than I expected it to.
The script everyone hands you goes something like: you should be relieved. You're free now. No more meetings, no more office politics, no more traffic. Rest. Enjoy it.
So when what you actually feel is something closer to loss, or loneliness, or regret, it starts to feel like you are doing retirement wrong. You feel guilty grieving something you walked away from on purpose.
How do you mourn a job you chose to leave?
Except I was not really grieving the job. I was grieving the version of myself I had spent 30 years becoming inside it. The routines. The colleagues who had turned into something closer to family over the decades. The sense of being useful in a way that other people could see and confirm back to me.
I was grieving a Ned who no longer had anywhere to report to on a Monday morning.
We talk about retirement as freedom, and it is. But nobody warns you that freedom can also just feel like loss wearing a nicer outfit.
Freedom can also feel like loss wearing a nicer outfit.
On retirement and unrecognized grief
What the Title Was Actually Doing
In many Filipino workplaces I knew, titles carried considerable weight. They signal age, rank, expertise, and how the two of you are supposed to relate to each other before either of you says a word.
Cross-cultural studies use the term power distance to describe the extent to which unequal distributions of authority are accepted and expected.
I had usually encountered discussions of power distance from the perspective of the less powerful person, adjusting around someone else’s authority. Retirement taught me the other side of that coin.
Power distance also shapes how the person in the higher position understands himself. For years, “Sir” told other people how to behave around me. What I did not clock until later is that I had also let it quietly tell me who I was.
The title was confirmation. It said, this man matters, his opinion carries weight, someone needs his sign off before this moves forward, he has a recognized place in something larger than himself.
Take the title away and the quiet that's left behind is bigger than you think it's going to be.
I used to think “Sir” was just what people called me. Turns out it was also, without my noticing, one of the ways I called myself.
A New Door Opening Doesn't Close the Old Grief
Around this time, I had already been accepted into the Cultural Intelligence Fellows program, one of 20 selected out of 377 applicants from around the world. It put me in a room, so to speak, with people who spend their careers thinking hard about how culture shapes the way we work and relate to each other.
On paper, that was proof I still had something worth offering. I knew that intellectually.
Emotionally, I was still standing just outside the life I had left, wondering if I had made a very expensive mistake.
A new opportunity landing in your lap does not automatically cancel out an old grief. Being recognized by a new community does not instantly replace an identity you spent three decades building brick by brick.
The fellowship showed me a door to another kind of future. It did not teach me how to actually live behind it. That part I had to figure out on my own, slowly, and honestly I am still figuring it out.
Learning to Be Bad at Something Again
After years of being the person expected to already know the answer, I had to go back to being a beginner. That is a strange, humbling place to land in your fifties.
I had to write things not knowing if a single person would read them. I had to pitch ideas with no big institutional name attached to soften the ask. I had to introduce myself at events without a corporate title doing half the work for me. I had to learn platforms and tools I had spent years avoiding, the exact digital shift I used to resist at work, and now here I was, having to actually live inside it.
There was humility in all of that. There was also, frankly, real fear.
When you have spent decades getting good at something, going back to being a beginner can feel like sliding backward. Sometimes, though, it is the only door that actually opens.
So I started writing, slowly at first. I picked up some teaching. I put together talks, then more talks. I went back into academic spaces, except this time I was carrying questions shaped by three decades of actually doing the work, not just studying it.
I found myself talking about stories, culture, identity, audiences, and how hard it is to make something mean the same thing across a border.
Somewhere in there I realized my 30 years in media had not evaporated the day I handed in my company ID. The experience was still there. The instincts were still there. What I had lost was the institution that used to hold all of it together for me.
Realizing I Had Already Been Doing the Work
For years I had worked with Filipino stories meant for audiences scattered across different countries. I had watched a story land perfectly with one audience and completely miss another, and I had watched creators wrestle with staying culturally rooted while still trying to travel globally.
At work, most of that lived in me as instinct. I could feel when something rang culturally true. I could sense when a scene or a character would not survive the trip across an ocean. I knew, without always being able to explain why, when a story needed more context to land.
Instinct is useful, but it is not yet a framework. Experience only becomes something you can teach when you slow down enough to actually name it.
Retirement finally gave me the room to do that naming.
The ideas turned into a book. The book turned into what I now call the CIS Bamboo Framework for culturally intelligent storytelling. And the questions kept expanding past stories alone, into workplaces, classrooms, healthcare teams, whole communities, even the relationships between nations.
Culture shapes what people carry into a room. Communication is what moves between them once they're in it. Connection is what's left behind after.
Out of that came the bigger C3 Framework: Culture, Communication, Connection, looked at through three lenses I call Stories, People, and Nations.
None of this appeared out of nowhere. I had been building toward it my whole career. I just did not have the vocabulary for it yet.
Reinvention Was Never About Becoming Someone New
For a while I assumed reinvention meant building a completely new person from scratch, leaving the old Ned behind entirely.
I don't believe that anymore.
Reinvention was never about becoming someone new.
On continuity, identity, and change
Reinvention, at least the kind I went through, was less about erasing 30 years in media and more about untangling the value of those years from the title and the institution that used to hold them together. It meant accepting that my experience still counted, even with nobody waiting on my sign off. It meant owning the parts where I resisted change, without deciding that meant I was done changing for good. It meant letting myself grieve a life I had chosen to leave, without treating that grief as proof I had gotten the decision wrong.
Today I call myself an author, an educator, and a speaker. Those words still matter to me. I just try to hold them a little more loosely than I held “Sir” for 30 years.
Titles are useful. They help other people understand quickly what you do. They were never supposed to be the only way I understood who I was, I just did not know that until I lost one.
Standing Without It
Funny enough, people call me “Sir” again now, mostly my students.
It lands differently these days. It belongs to a classroom, a specific relationship, a moment. It doesn't have to carry my whole sense of self on its back anymore.
I am still figuring a lot of this out, to be honest. There are still mornings I miss the certainty of the old world, the org chart, the clear lines of who reports to whom. Reinvention did not turn out to be a clean line from loss to triumph, whatever the LinkedIn posts might suggest. It is more like an ongoing negotiation between who I was, who I am now, and who I am still becoming.
Retirement did not hand me a new life overnight. What it gave me was the harder, slower gift of finding out what was actually left once the title, the hierarchy, and the familiar version of myself were taken off the table.
What was left were the stories. The questions I had been carrying without naming them. The instinct to make what I had learned useful to somebody else.
Maybe that is what reinvention actually is. Not turning into a different person, but finally recognizing the person you had already been quietly becoming the whole time.
Nobody calls me “Sir” the same way anymore.
I think that's alright.
“Sir” used to tell me where I stood inside an institution.
These days I'm learning how to stand without one.
Concept Notes
- Disenfranchised grief. The term is associated with grief that is not fully acknowledged or socially supported. The broader literature also recognizes consequential non-death losses and life transitions. See Kenneth J. Doka’s work on disenfranchised grief.
- Power distance. In the Hofstede tradition, power distance concerns the degree to which less powerful members of groups and institutions accept and expect unequal distributions of power. Read the model overview.
Editorial disclosure: This reflection was written from Ned Legaspi’s personal experience and developed for publication with AI-assisted editing. The ideas, experiences, judgments, and final approval are the author’s.