Every connection. All of it. Gone.
I’m still deciding if it was the worst mistake I ever made or the most honest thing I’ve ever done.
The Deletion
It was August 2019. I had just started what looked like the best job of my career. Senior role. Great title. The kind of promotion you call your mother about. I lasted sixty days. On my way out, I did something I had not planned and cannot fully explain. I opened my LinkedIn account, ten years of carefully maintained professional identity, 500+ connections, recommendations from people I genuinely respected, and deleted all of it. Not deactivated. Deleted. I would like to tell you it was a profound, intentional act of liberation. The truth is it felt more like flipping a table. Satisfying in the moment. Slightly embarrassing in retrospect.
The Cost
Here is what nobody tells you about deleting your LinkedIn: The connections don’t come back. I know. Obvious in hindsight. But when you are sitting on your carpet at 3am in a slightly dramatic mood, the long-term implications of your decisions are not always crystal clear. Last year I opened a new account. Searched for people I had worked with, learned from, genuinely liked. Most of them gone. Not gone gone. Just no longer findable in the way they once were. Some windows close quietly and don’t reopen. I also had to explain the gap to people. “So where did you go?” Turns out “I had a moment and deleted everything” is not universally understood as a strategic career move. It was a real loss. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What I Built Instead
Here is the thing about burning your professional past to the ground: you find out very quickly what was actually worth keeping. In the silence after the deletion, and there was a lot of silence, I started paying attention to different things. Not markets. Not strategy decks. My own body. My own cycles. The things I had been leaving outside the room every single day for a decade. I spent the years that followed in serious study across ancient wisdom traditions. Tantric Yoga. Advaita Vedanta. The intelligence of the feminine cycles. In Sweden, in Glastonbury, in Sicily, in Bali. It sounds like an Eat Pray Love sequel :) It was nothing like that. It was rigorous, uncomfortable, and occasionally transcendent. And then the pandemic arrived and closed everything, which, as it turns out, was perfect timing for someone who had already burned her career down and was building something new from scratch.
What I Know Now
The body’s NO is never wrong about the direction. Only sometimes clumsy about the method. Deleting your entire LinkedIn is, objectively, a clumsy method. I would not necessarily recommend it as a career strategy. There are probably more elegant ways to begin again. But beginning again was the right thing. The table needed flipping. The professional identity I had been performing, capable, strategic, always-on, seasonless, was not the whole of me. It was just the part I had been told was worth showing up with. The rest of me turned out to be more interesting.
I opened a new account last year, mostly empty, and I am building again, this time from the inside outward. I’m still deciding if it was a mistake. Most days, I don’t think it was.
Zeynep
