The short answer
You sit between two worlds and feel claimed by neither. The fix isn't to bridge harder — it's to stop waiting for others to define your seat and claim it yourself. Name your role out loud, set the terms of your value, and let both sides orient around you instead of leaning through you.
You're doing two jobs at once — translating technical reality for sales and business reality for engineers — and that's genuinely hard work. Research on cross-functional sales roles shows that people in this position carry enormous informal power because they hold knowledge both sides need. But that same position leaves you exposed: neither side fully owns you, so neither side fully protects you. You feel the weight without the recognition.
Marcus Aurelius put it plainly: maintain your own purpose free from compulsion. Right now, your purpose is being shaped by everyone else's needs. You run toward whoever pulls hardest. That's not a bridge — that's a rope in a tug-of-war. The research on boundary-spanning roles in technical sales points to the same trap: the person in the middle often loses a clear identity because they keep adapting to whoever they're facing. The role demands it, but nobody teaches you how to hold your ground inside it.
This week, write one paragraph — just for yourself — that answers this: what do I uniquely make possible that neither the sales team nor the technical team could do alone? Don't describe your tasks. Describe your value. Then say that paragraph out loud to one senior stakeholder — not as a complaint, but as a positioning statement. You're not asking to be claimed. You're telling them where you stand.