The role you end up in does not exist yet
The positions that have suited you were assembled rather than applied for, out of what needed doing and nobody was doing. Pluto in Aquarius in the 10th house puts the refusal to standardise into your public role, so a conventional career path has never quite worked.
There are two clocks in this placement. One runs in decades and handed you the Aquarius setting along with everybody else born across that long stretch; the other ran on the day you arrived and handed you the 10th house. Only the second is a fact about you. It puts the deviation into your standing and your public work rather than into your private life, which is why your professional history takes longer to explain than most people's.
The test is changing it from inside
Leaving is easy and produces nothing. Staying inside an institution long enough to alter how it works, while it is doing things you dislike, is the actual exercise and it costs years. You have done it once or not at all. Choose one thing worth staying for, since your instinct will present departure as integrity every time.
How the refusal is read
Senior people see somebody who will not follow the expected route and conclude that you are not serious about progression. What is true is that the route does not lead anywhere you want to be. Say where you are actually going, out loud, since an unstated trajectory is read as an absence of one.
The arrangement nobody questions any more
On the arrangement everybody has agreed to stop questioning: the process that exists because it always has, the hierarchy nobody would defend and everybody observes, the seniority that rests on nothing. You are unable to leave those alone even when it is plainly not your business. That is your genuine contribution to any organisation and it is also the reason some of them will never be able to house you comfortably.
Reform that survives your departure
Changing how something works is what you do, and almost none of it survives you because it lives in your practice rather than in the structure. Write one change into the actual system this year: a policy, a document, a training, something that continues when you have gone. That is the difference between influence and a record.
Your record does not read as a career
Written down, your professional history looks like a series of unrelated decisions, and in any conventional process that counts against you. The through-line is real and it is not visible in the sequence. Write the one-sentence version of what you have actually been doing all along, since without it every reader supplies their own and theirs is worse.
You are the useful outsider
In your field you are known and not quite included, invited when something needs shaking and not when things are being decided. That position gives you unusual freedom and no leverage. Ask for a seat where the decisions are made, once, explicitly, since the outsider's role is comfortable enough that you will otherwise keep it by default.
Autonomy has been the actual objective
Looking back, every significant professional decision has been about who gets to tell you what to do rather than about money or position. That is a coherent objective and you have never stated it as one. Write it down, since a stated aim can be pursued deliberately and an unstated one just produces a series of departures.
You are paid for the thing nobody advertises
Your income comes from a capability that has no standard job title, which means the market rate for it does not exist and you have been guessing for years. Find three people doing something adjacent and ask what they charge, since in the absence of any benchmark your estimate has been anchored to whatever you were first offered.
The idea that will not let you sleep
What keeps you awake is not stress about work, it is a problem you have found interesting, and you will follow it until three in the morning while describing yourself as unable to sleep. The mechanism is appetite rather than anxiety. Write the thread down and close the notebook, since the mind lets go of what it believes has been safely stored.