Illness Forced an Occupational Therapist to Retire. Her Career Pivot Revealed What Endures

When illness forced Dr. Jessica Mack to leave her occupational therapy career, she expected grief and financial anxiety. She also felt relief. That unexpected response led her to question a belief she had carried for years: that her profession was the source of her purpose and value.

Mack had nearly passed out at work before she accepted that something was wrong. She knew her symptoms were serious, but stepping away from work felt more frightening than continuing to struggle with her health. Years of training, close relationships with colleagues and reliance on her income all made the role hard to imagine losing. She had also built her identity around being an occupational therapist and around the idea that she could keep going.

As her health worsened, retirement became unavoidable. The change brought grief, anxiety about the family’s finances and disruption to daily routines. Yet alongside those losses came a sense of freedom. Mack had spent years encouraging patients to see themselves as more than a single role. Only when her own career ended did she begin to apply that idea to herself.

Why a job can stand in for purpose

A career makes value visible in ways that purpose often doesn’t. A job title can be named; a paycheck can be counted. Meaning is harder to put on a résumé. Mack’s view is that professionals may let those concrete signals become evidence of their worth, especially as work shapes their routines, relationships and sense of identity over time.

That attachment isn’t simply a personal failing. Workplaces reward advancement, while reflection about whether a role still fits can be easy to put off. People may not examine their direction until illness, job loss, restructuring, bereavement or a change in a relationship makes the question unavoidable. At that point, considering purpose can feel less like open-ended exploration and more like a crisis.

Mack’s own experience sharpened the distinction between the work someone does and the qualities they bring to it. Losing a role can unsettle identity because the job has become woven into ordinary life. But a role can also make underlying strengths easy to overlook: those skills may continue to matter even after the professional setting disappears.

Find the thread that crosses roles

For Mack, rebuilding began with identifying what stayed consistent across different kinds of work. She found that she could explain complex subjects simply, wanted to help people understand their circumstances and drew energy from connection more than credentials. Those traits appeared in clinical work, food blogging and speaking on camera.

Her work changed, but those abilities carried across settings. That distinction is useful during a career pivot: transferable strengths describe what a person can contribute, while a job description sets out the tasks and responsibilities of one particular role. Looking for the former can help people assess what might fit without rushing to attach their identity to the next position.

The urge to restore stability quickly is understandable. But choosing a new role before understanding what matters can reproduce the same dependence on a title. Mack argues that the time spent with uncertainty is part of realignment: it helps separate genuine interests and values from assumptions inherited from a career.

Three questions for a career decision

Mack now uses three questions when she faces a career choice, whether she is considering a change or circumstances are pushing her toward one.

What remains mine regardless of the title? The answer might be a capability that would still be useful if a particular job vanished. Mack’s ability to make complex information accessible showed up in food blogging, which at first seemed far removed from occupational therapy. In both settings, she was educating people and making information practical for everyday life.

Is this restlessness or fear? Restlessness may indicate that a person has outgrown a role. Fear of instability can also shape a decision, but it signals a different concern. Recognizing which feeling is driving the choice may help someone avoid staying in a poor fit simply because change feels uncertain, or leaving without understanding what they want next.

What small test can I try this month? Rather than trying to settle an entire career plan at once, Mack suggests a limited experiment: one conversation, a class or a small project. Such a step may provide useful information without requiring a sweeping commitment. Clarity can come from trying a direction and noticing what the experience reveals.

Mack now practices occupational therapy again, but on terms she chose. She sees the return as a realignment, not a return to the life she had before illness. The constant, in her account, was never the occupation itself. It was the values and abilities she carried through each change.

A job title can disappear quickly, while the skills and ways of connecting that supported it may remain. For anyone facing a career shift, Mack’s experience points to a practical question: what would still be true about your abilities, values and relationships if your current role were gone tomorrow? Exploring that question before circumstances demand it can make the next decision more grounded. Her purpose, she found, could outlast the job description through which she had first expressed it.