Embracing Your Own Purgatory: Finding meaning in the space between who you were and who you are becoming

We are taught to treat every ending as the start of a comeback – the redundancy that becomes a reinvention, the setback that becomes a story with a tidy bow. But what about the space in between? The disorienting, uncomfortable stretch where the old identity is gone and the new one hasn’t arrived?

In this special Blend Book Club Live, we’re joined by Geoff Curtis – former chief communication officer at Horizon Therapeutics and author of Embracing Your Own Purgatory – for an honest, vulnerable conversation about what happens when the title, the relevance and the armor we build our lives around suddenly disappear.

After almost three decades in healthcare communications, Geoff’s role became redundant following a company acquisition. What followed wasn’t a reinvention story – it was a reckoning. He calls the space he landed in purgatory: the uncomfortable in-between of not knowing who he was or what he was becoming. Rather than writing from the safety of the other side, Geoff wrote from inside it, while he was still figuring it out. The result is a rare, unfinished, deeply human account of identity, achievement addiction, delayed grie, and the depression that follows when our façades finally crack.

Drawing on his own experience and the stories of others navigating their own purgatories, Geoff will explore how high achievers can:

• Recognize when achievement has become comfortable armor and what it costs to use work to outrun grief, anxiety, and fear
• Separate professional role from personal worth, so that losing a title doesn’t mean losing a sense of self
• Resist the pressure to “figure it out fast”, and find the value in waiting rather than rushing to fill the void
• Give themselves permission to stay publicly unfinished and being okay with not having things figured

Whether you’ve lost something that defined you, you’re exhausted from suppressing what you truly feel, or you’re supporting someone through a hard season of their own, this is a conversation about presence over performance, honesty over armor, and the reassurance that you are not alone. This is about permission, not a plan.