The Work Breakup𑁋Making Space for Grief

My journey with professional loss and the poetry that got me through it.

Photo by Morgan Basham on Unsplash

Fragments of and in an empty room.

Grief is the response to a loss. Growing up, I viewed grief as an experience based on proximity to death. As time ticks on, my view expands. While the depth of grief will be unique to the person and the loss, the physical + emotional pain, the non-linear pangs of grief, and the act of grieving still exist. Grief is saying goodbye to a future; it’s leaving behind a version of yourself; it’s sudden change without consent; it’s breaking up.

When my college boyfriend and I broke up𑁋a person in my life wasn’t in my life anymore. I needed to redefine our friendships, reimagine my plans, and rediscover my identity.

The ways in which I interacted in the world ended. I replaced them with rumination. I taxed my mind replaying what could have been different. The overthinking and stress led to insomnia, anxiety, depression, and an inability to regulate emotions. In grief or trauma, our brain lowers our access to logic + language and lights our fear center𑁋fight or flight. At 21, I didn’t have the tools or language to recognize or cope with my heartbreak.

Then, last year, when I left my company post-acquisition and mid-pandemic, I felt a resurgence of those feelings𑁋relief and fear. The way I interacted with the world for seven years was ending. A relationship breakup has been compared to the physical pain of breaking a bone. When I left my company, physically, I oscillated between a pit in my stomach and butterflies. Emotionally, I felt frozen and free.

Ending a job is a breakup, a loss.

It’s a loss of people and your relationship to them. The people you work with etch a path. When you no longer see them, the path severs. It’s many goodbyes, not one.

It’s a loss to your livelihood and a challenge to your sense of worthiness. Often before you’re ready, you have to communicate your loss to others. The potential for financial distress impacts how quickly you need a new job. Being thrown forward before processing what’s happened is the rebound. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people in my career, and the bereaved job seeker is a palpable archetype. They’re not just experiencing the ongoing pangs of grief; they are actively grieving their loss.

It’s a loss of identity. We teach children to identify with a career𑁋the childhood “what do you want to be when you grow up?” becomes the “what do you do?” of small talk. So, you need to replace your identifiers.

In 2022, nearly 1,000 tech companies have laid off over 150,000 individuals. Layoffs are unpleasant, jarring, and carry ripple effects. Layoffs change the people left behind; the company renegotiated the rules. That impacts clarity, psychological safety, and dependability𑁋known factors in performance.

Letting an individual go irrevocably changes their relationship to work. Where there was once trust in their talents, there is fear. Just like a new partner can carry the sins of an ex, a new company inherits the fears each person brings along. Healing is an individual journey. In a work breakup, you get to decide how to shape your rituals, friendships, plans, and identity. Luckily, our brains adapt; they grow, reorganize, and create new paths.

Navigating friendships and routine in a new context.

Friendships at work create belonging, connection, and better collaboration. My work relationships have been a source of joy and comfort, but they were on auto-pilot. The friendship was established and kept in the context of work; they were harder to maintain beyond the proverbial office walls. I grabbed tea every morning with the same individual. The physical path was ingrained; without it, there was a void.

I had a choice to let the friendship fade or keep it. Retention takes nurturing a new path. It meant asking permission before talking about work to be mindful of our new context and setting a standing date to meet up. It’s a new ritual.

Rituals are intentional practices that you choose; they’re more than a daily routine to make your bed. Rituals involve planning and motion, which can pull you out of the singular emotion of heartbreak. I created patterns with my friends, but I also set them for the times I was home alone. It was surreal to go from a day of conversations to quiet stillness.

Rituals and routines don’t rely on the whims of motivation. My favorite was cooking a healthy lunch while listening to music, and not just any music but music that I’ve loved throughout my life, to remind me that I existed in another time and place and will continue to do so.

The job was ephemeral, not me. I am the constant.

In being the constant, my identity and adoration of that identity matter.

Our relationship with ourselves is a meaningful one that’s often neglected, especially at work. The traditional American workplace is about stripping away the individual to create cohesion, loyalty, and productivity. With daily exposure to that, it’s easy to see ourselves as made up at least partly of our workplace, not to mention we adopt the behaviors + traits of those closest to ourselves. When our relationship with a workplace ends, there’s an untangling that needs to happen. Who are you without the company?

For me, the journey was similar to motherhood. My identity, schedule, and emotional capacity changed by having a child, but I was still me. I needed to unearth how the core of me fit into my evolving world.

In rediscovering my identity, two mantras helped 1) I’m the constant, and 2) I trust my talents. We spend so much time working it’s unreasonable to eliminate it from the equation when it comes to our identity. Rather it’s a reframing of your values and who you want to be. When I worked in retail during college, I didn’t see it as who I was. But I could be who I was𑁋compassionate, curious, and creative𑁋while working there.

Identity is about who you are, who you are becoming, and then bringing that into situations. Not about letting situations shape you. Once I took responsibility for my identity, it also built up my internal sense of worth.

Work tells us our worth via compensation, review ratings, and everyday interactions. Others decide𑁋what we can or can’t do, what we are or aren’t capable of, and if our opinion matters or not. Work is trading your talents for employment, but identity and self-worth belong to you.

If you lose sight of that, go outside to physically dismantle your tunnel vision. Reconnect to friends, hobbies, creative expression, and nostalgia. See who you are without the job, the company, the college boyfriend.

Love and grief are intertwined.

Nostalgia gets a bad rap, but who we’ve been can be a lens to who we’re becoming and capable of becoming.

Nostalgia…

• reminds me that I existed in another time in place.
• reminds me of how I’m capable of feeling.
• reminds me of what I’m capable of overcoming.

After my work breakup, I avoided positive views of the past. But nostalgia isn’t the sticky sappiness I made it out to be. Instead, being nostalgic reminds me of where I was, how I’ve grown, and why my experiences matter today. It gives me a sense of continuity and meaning. My experiences helped create the version of me today, so looking back through rose-colored glasses is better for me than swallowing the bitter pill.

That being said, I don’t believe everything happens for a reason.

Some losses feel pointless and wrench our hearts. Some losses eat away our capacity to trust and be vulnerable. Job loss, especially when the decision isn’t yours, strips away the choice, control, and closure that we crave.

We like certainty and hold on to predictable things even when they don’t serve us. Obsessive thoughts, impulsivity, trouble concentrating, and ruminating on what you could have done differently all take over from rational thinking during loss.

I liked my life and the person I was; I felt waves of emotion with my work breakup. I felt guilty and silly for these feelings. Mostly, I felt that any forward motion would make the loss real, so I sat still for a while.

In the stillness, I journaled.

Journaling is where I go when I’m lost. It’s a way of bearing witness to my grief and validating it without judgment or advice. Following the end of my college relationship, I filled a black composition notebook with poetry and called it The Breakup Rituals.

In the beginning, they were sad poems. Then they transitioned to nostalgia for the love I had and the beginning of new love. I took a similar journey with work; I wrote angsty poetry that mellowed out in a year’s time.

One of my early poems last year was:

It’s impractical to attach oneself to a fairytale.

My grief is a trinket, frivolous to all who see it.

Now how to abandon my tender thoughts?

Poetry has taught me about my patterns.

Good or bad, boiling your thoughts down to as few words as possible has a way of drawing what matters to the top. One pattern was stuff. Things and places hold memories. I worked from home during the pandemic, so my home had work memories. An empty desk chair became a pitted reminder.

And I had this t-shirt from my ex-boyfriend, the only item I kept. First, it made me angry, then sad, then wistful, and one day I felt nothing for it.

reduce. reuse. recycle.

Your shirt is what I wear to dye my hair.

On my last day of work, I cleared my desk after not seeing it for a year. It was a relic, a time capsule, years of collection, memories, and notes to self.

home

where once was a collaboration

there is nothing

but artifacts that deserve a new home.

The last observation from my writing is that regret fades. I wanted to pluck my college relationship from my brain a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The relationship caused me great harm, yet the breakup ended a source of comfort, purpose, and future. My feelings were complex. One of the first entries in the journal is:

The wounds of the past aren’t easily ignored.

They hang on like the litter that snags the rotting branches after a storm.

Companies carelessly leave scars.

In the days leading up to my last day, I wrote𑁋I’d go back and miss my turn. Regret is a finicky thing for me because I have people I quite cherish in my life. But I didn’t learn a lesson from every loss. Sometimes, I simply felt them, cried for them, and accepted the scar.

After every loss, I reconnected to my hobbies, values, and identity. Hobbies change what you spend time thinking about; they remind you that you’re more than a one-dimensional worker bee. Poetry was one of mine𑁋reading and writing. Through it, I described who I was, and the values and identity needed to create my original and meaningful life.

A job for me is a vessel for how I live out or fund a greater purpose of bringing soul into the workplace. My mission is mine and doesn’t have to exist in one context, and realizing that my identity and passion were separate from a company helped me weather the next loss in a much easier fashion. I donated the branded t-shirt, mailed back the laptop, and started the journey to building new pathways. The company isn’t the constant; I am.

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Hi, I’m Courtney, the founder of Work Healing for leaders and individuals. I’ve spent over a decade nurturing people + culture for tech companies with a personal mission to bring soul to the workplace.