How Perimenopause, an ADHD Diagnosis and an Unexpected Layoff Reshaped My Leadership and Priorities
For most of my life, I believed the path forward was clear.
As a millennial woman raised in the era of modern feminism, surrounded by a hardworking mother and strong female role models, I was taught that a woman’s place was in the boardroom and that building a full, expansive life alongside a meaningful career was not only possible, but expected.
Strength, in that context, often meant holding everything together. Showing up. Pushing through. Continuing forward, even when things felt difficult beneath the surface.
For a long time, I carried that definition of strength with me.
Like many professionals in technology and the channel ecosystem, I built my career within that framework, moving steadily forward with each new responsibility and opportunity. There was always more to do, more to build, more to lead — and I found energy in that forward motion.
Then, slowly and almost imperceptibly at first, something began to shift.
After the birth of my second child, I started experiencing changes that were difficult to name. My focus felt less reliable. My energy fluctuated in ways that didn’t follow any clear pattern. Tasks that had once felt manageable began to require more effort, more structure, more intention.
At first, I explained it away in the ways many of us do. This is just what this stage of life looks like. More responsibility. Less sleep. The natural weight of managing both a growing career and a growing family.
So I did what I had always done.
I pushed through.
But over time, the gap between what I was experiencing and how I believed I was supposed to function continued to widen.
Eventually, those quiet shifts collided with something larger.
A corporate transformation.
A new leadership dynamic.
An accelerating pace of change.
The pressure that had been building quietly in the background was suddenly impossible to ignore.
What I initially believed was stress or burnout turned out to be something else entirely.
Within a relatively short period of time, I received two diagnoses that reframed everything I had been experiencing: ADHD and perimenopause.
Both are common for women in mid-career. Both are frequently misunderstood. And both often go undiagnosed for years — especially for women who have spent their lives compensating quietly, adapting and continuing to perform.
For the first time, the pieces began to align.
The fluctuations in focus.
The shifts in energy.
The sense that something fundamental had changed.
What I had interpreted as a breakdown in discipline or resilience was not that at all.
It was biology.
And understanding that did not diminish my sense of capability. It gave me language. It gave me context. It gave me permission to approach my work, and my life, differently.
Around that same time, I made the decision to take medical leave.
For someone who had spent years equating forward momentum with success, stepping away felt deeply unfamiliar. But it quickly became one of the most important decisions I have ever made.
For the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to pause.
Not to fix anything.
Not to push through anything.
But simply to understand.
I spent time learning how my brain processes information and how hormonal changes influence focus, energy and decision-making. I began to rethink how I structured my days, how I approached my work and how I defined productivity.
Just as importantly, I reconnected with the parts of my life that had been quietly competing for attention.
My family.
My health.
My sense of purpose beyond achievement.
What began as a moment of disruption gradually became something far more valuable.
Clarity.
When I returned to work, I felt that shift in ways that were both subtle and profound. The external demands of leadership had not changed, but my relationship to them had.
I was no longer trying to operate within a model of strength that required constant output and invisible effort. Instead, I began building a more intentional way of working — one that aligned my energy with the work that mattered most and allowed for a more sustainable form of leadership.
It felt, in many ways, like stepping into a new chapter with a clearer understanding of myself than I had ever had before.
And then, not long after returning, the path shifted again.
I was laid off.
Moments like that are often described as a loss of control. And in many ways, they are. But for me, something unexpected happened.
The work I had done to better understand myself had already changed how I viewed success, stability and forward progress. Instead of undoing that transformation, the layoff became part of it.
It created space.
Space to ask different questions.
Space to make more intentional choices.
Space to decide what I wanted the next chapter to look like, rather than simply continuing along the path I had been on.
Sometimes what feels like disruption is actually permission.
Permission to reassess what we have been carrying.
Permission to release expectations that no longer serve us.
Permission to redefine what strength looks like.
For me, that redefinition has been one of the most important outcomes of this past year.
Strength is no longer about holding everything together at all costs.
It is about understanding when to pause.
When to adapt.
When to ask for support.
And when to choose a different path entirely.
One of the things this experience has reinforced most clearly is the role that community plays in shaping our careers.
The technology and channel ecosystems are built on relationships — on conversations, shared experiences and the willingness of people to offer perspective when it is needed most.
Looking back, many of the most meaningful moments in my own career came from conversations that were never formally structured. A mentor offering context. A colleague sharing a lesson learned. A leader taking the time to say, “I’ve been there too.”
Those moments do not appear on a resume.
But they change careers.
For women in particular, mentorship creates space to navigate the complexity that often goes unspoken — the balancing, the shifting, the invisible pressures that exist alongside professional ambition.
When we share our experiences openly, including the chapters that did not go as planned, we make it easier for others to navigate their own paths with greater clarity and confidence.
Careers rarely unfold in straight lines.
More often, they evolve through moments that challenge the assumptions we have been carrying for years.
And sometimes, when the path breaks, it is not an ending.
It is the beginning of something far more aligned than what we were following before.
About the Author
Marcela Gonzalez Cagle is a partner ecosystem leader with 15+ years building the programs, systems and operational frameworks that make partner organizations actually work, not just exist on paper. Her background spans partner marketing, experience, enablement and GTM operations. She thinks in campaigns and systems simultaneously, which means she can build the partner portal and drive adoption of it, design the certification program and market it to the ecosystem, launch the implementation motion and tell the story that gets partners to show up. Most recently at Vonage, where she led global partner experience and programs across a 3,000+ partner ecosystem. The through line across everything she’s done is this: partner programs only work when partners actually use them. That takes equal parts operational design and marketing thinking, and she’s spent her career sitting at that intersection. She’s currently exploring what’s next, and in the meantime running PX Studio, her personal AI and operations lab. It’s where she builds agents, tests automations, pressure-tests workflows and generally does science experiments on the kind of operational problems she’s spent her career solving.
