Welcome to Beyond Stability, where psychiatrist, researcher and humanitarian adviser Dr. Suzan Song shares reflections about how we think, decide, and partner during uncertain times to find a sense of groundedness and joy.
A strange thing happens when you become good at starting things.
People assume you must want to keep running them.
Over the past year, several initiatives I hoped might work actually did. A humanitarian training I built was wildly successful. A policy piece was accepted. Conversations around my book started opening doors I genuinely never expected would open for me.
But instead of feeling motivated and driven, I’ve got this low-grade sense of, now what?
Last month, I realized I had become the default decision-maker for five different projects I never consciously agreed to lead long-term. One Slack thread turned into a committee. One pilot training turned into expectations for quarterly cohorts.
None of this is bad, as most came from opportunity, trust in me, and goodwill.
But I started to become uncomfortable: I was now dreading emails from projects I supposedly cared about.
It reminded me that oftentimes, our professional culture rewards doing more than discernment. Especially in ambitious circles, there’s an almost moral quality attached to acceleration. If something gains traction, scale it. If people respond, build the platform. If you have an idea, move quickly before someone else does.
What we talk about less is that creating something and wanting to operate it indefinitely are often different goals, requiring different skill sets.
The person who can generate momentum in ambiguity isn’t always the person who wants to manage infrastructure, supervise teams, handle politics, run fundraising calls, or become the long-term public face of an institution. But we tend to collapse all of those abilities into one category called leadership.
Many highly capable people quietly become trapped by things that once excited them—not because the projects failed, but because they succeeded.
At first, the success feels expansive. But then structure begins forming around the idea, expectations grow and more people attach themselves to the mission. You wake up one day realizing a project that once felt alive now has layers, obligations, dependencies, and other people’s ambitions wrapped around it.
And somewhere in there, another feeling can emerge that almost nobody admits publicly, but I see in most ambitious people: a fear of being replaceable inside your own work.
We can’t blame this entirely on ego, though that’s a part of being human. I think it’s more about identity. In many professions now, there’s very little separation between what you build and who you are. Your ideas become attached to your reputation, your relationships, your credibility, sometimes even your sense of self. So when a project evolves beyond your control or becomes more institutional than personal, it can create a surprisingly disorienting feeling.
People become oddly territorial about projects they simultaneously no longer want to run. That contradiction is uncomfortable to admit. But it’s human and logical.
For years, many of us were taught that uncertainty should be solved through productivity. Keep moving. Keep building. Keep experimenting. Keep putting things into the world. To some extent, that strategy works. It creates momentum, opportunity and relevance.
Until eventually you look around and realize you’re holding together too many things that no longer feel alive to you.
You can be deeply grateful for the opportunity and deeply tired by it at the same time.
Perhaps success is less about scaling every working idea and more about becoming more selective about which identities you agree to lean into.
A successful pilot is not a mandate to expand—some things exist to prove possibility. Sometimes learning when to exit is just as important as learning how to build in the first place.
Notes & Invitations
Why We Suffer and How We Heal (Penguin, 2026) draws on two decades of clinical care and humanitarian fieldwork to examine how people find grounding after rupture.
If it resonated, a review here makes a real difference. Sending the book to someone who’s having a hard year is also a good way to let them know they matter to you.
Free Guide to building your own Three Friends of Winter Circles here
Longer reflections, press, and events at www.suzansong.com
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Life is hard. But it’s harder when we’re at it alone.
