The Grief of Becoming Someone Else

One of the questions I posed in a recent LinkedIn post was this: How do I build something new without discarding everything that came before?

This question emerged for me from a period of professional transition. After spending most of my working life in universities, as a teacher, researcher and research leader, I now find myself gradually constructing a different kind of ‘portfolio’ career, bringing together academic work, coaching, consultancy and celebrancy. On the whole, this is proving to be a very positive development. It has opened up new challenges, introduced new ways of thinking and provided the opportunity to bring my wealth of experience to bear in different contexts and roles. It is encouraging me to think differently about the next chapter of my working life. Yet I have increasingly realised that this transition is not simply an exercise in career planning or self-promotion; it is an emotional and existential experience too. What I had not anticipated was the degree to which becoming someone who, at first, felt unfamiliar involved grieving for what had gone before.

Perhaps we associate grief too readily with bereavement. However, relationship breakdown, illness, redundancy, retirement and other profound life changes all carry their own forms of grief. We recognise grief when something is taken from us. What is less easy to recognise is the grief that can accompany growth itself. The promotion we worked hard to achieve, the role that stretches us in new ways, or the retirement we have carefully planned for, even such positive changes carry some element of sadness.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that our identities become entangled with the professional lives we have lived. For many years, if someone had asked me who I was, I would probably have answered first by describing my work identity, not because I consciously equated my identity with my profession per se, but because the two had become woven together over time. Academic working life provided structure, purpose, relationships, intellectual challenge and a sense of contribution and achievement. It also offered a range of freedoms, for instance, the freedom to spend time researching subjects that interested me, something many of my peers in other professions demonstrably didn’t have. It offered not only a living but a way of being.

When such frameworks begin to change, even when we have chosen that change and worked towards it, some degree of grief seems almost inevitable. A role may disappear or evolve into a new one, but the person remains. It can take time to discover who that person is amidst the change.

Increasingly, I find that many of the people I meet through coaching are wrestling with similar questions of identity shift, even amidst positive life and career moves. A headteacher who has become a MAT CEO. A senior leader approaching retirement. A clinician moving into management. A lawyer moving into a senior partnership. A minister leaving parish life. All professionals whose expertise is no longer expressed in the way that it once was.

Often, the challenge is not acquiring new skills, but relinquishing an older identity and patterns of working and ways of being. This can feel surprisingly disorientating because there is rarely a clear script for how to do it well. We are encouraged to embrace change, reinvent ourselves and move forward; less often are we encouraged to honour what is being left behind.

Yet there is something important about acknowledging the debt we owe to former versions of ourselves, and recognising the gifts, wisdom and experience they continue to bring into the present. These former roles and identities are not mistakes to be discarded; they have shaped us; they deserve gratitude rather than embarrassment. We owe it to ourselves to allow space for grief, to celebrate what was and to learn what to carry forward.

Perhaps, then, the question is not simply how we build something new, but whether we can do so without becoming estranged from the person who brought us this far? Can we honour the teacher, the researcher, the clinician, the minister, the leader, the parent, even as those identities evolve? Can we allow ourselves to grieve what is changing without assuming that grief means we have taken a wrong turn?

Increasingly, I suspect that the healthiest transitions are not those in which we become someone else altogether, but those in which deeper aspects of ourselves find new forms of expression. The work may change, the context may change, the forms of contribution may change, but something enduring is maintained beneath.

If you have lived through a significant professional or personal transition:

What part of yourself did you have to let go of?

What has remained unexpectedly constant?

What might you never have discovered had change not occurred?

And what part of yourself is still waiting to find its next expression?