Tackling professional grief

A guest post and start of a week-long series

Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash

Something that comes up a lot with authors and other self-employed people, is the idea of professional jealousy.

That thing where you see someone you know and like doing well, and you’re pleased for them, but also feel a sharp pang that you maybe aren’t doing as well in that particular thing. How did they get there so fast? Why is their book doing so well? How did they land that promotion? Etc.

In the context of book marketing, the thing I get told about most is when you see an author in your space getting loads of marketing support from their publisher, while your book got a few tweets and a ‘good luck’.

I brought this up on Substack a few weeks ago, and 3 brilliant women offered to contribute pieces on this. What it feels like, how to tackle it, or maybe just how to make peace with it. I’ll be releasing all three articles this week, which I know is more than usual, but I think this is a super interesting topic, and hope you find it useful.

The first is from

Susannah Mary

. Instead of looking at this as professional jealousy, she thinks of it as grief - mourning the thing that could have been. Here she starts with some thoughts that maybe you’ve occasionally while scrolling social media…

Five books and 3000 paying subscribers. A six-figure writing business and she shops there - I’m still careful about H&M purchases. 400,000 Instagram followers, a YouTube channel and two books under her belt. And another bestselling author! Maybe that’s where I’ll be when I’m older, when I’m grown-up.

And then that slap-in-the-face shock when I see that we are exactly the same age. Sometimes they’re younger. Perhaps two or three years older, but how am I supposed to catch up now? All those years nearly-wasted, over a decade working at somewhere between 60 and 10%. If only I’d listened to my body, paid attention to the signs, not been brought up in a keep-calm-and-carry-on culture. If only I’d not given birth.

Anger and sadness and frustration were mixing in a slowly churning blender and I felt like there was no word to describe how I felt. Until I came across a quote and, all at once, my feelings made sense.

“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”

I was grieving for where I could have been if I’d known better; if it hadn’t been for that stupid decision; if I’d listened more carefully; if I’d chosen a different path. So many ifs leading nowhere. Weeks passed and a palimpsest of the everyday covered this stupid feeling. But it was still there, underneath. And the weird thing is that I have known real grief, I knew grief at 8 years old - it’s not a word I use lightly.

I tried my best to ignore it. You’re doing it now, you’ve started. There’s no point regretting wasted hours and weeks and months long gone. You’re doing it now.
But it still didn’t go away.

Then, one day, I saw an article on quitting a successful career - financially successful, the way you’re supposed to be. It wasn’t relevant to me at all, that was obvious. I think part of me wanted to rub salt into the wound, see how much of a mess I’d really made.

And so I read it and it changed everything.

I was suddenly in a very different bubble, reading about financial success, positions on the bestseller list, subscriber numbers. And these people, with all their success, had to take a big step back. And the strange thing was that where they are now felt incredibly similar to where I am. As if together, from very different exit scenarios, we’d stepped into the same space together.

And that professional grief did something that death grief never does - it disappeared almost overnight. I felt like I was standing in the same room as these other women - yes, they have money, bestseller rankings, huge followings. But life had stripped us all bare and there we were, sitting naked in the sauna together, with more in common than I could ever have believed.

There are reasons why we are where we are today - what’s important is where we go next.

After working as a translator and editor for 10 years, I now focus on putting my own words on the page, adding to the conversation around mental health and psychiatry, hypercapitalism and identity by sharing my knowledge, research, and lived experience. In my free time, I love taking care of houseplants, crafting with my daughter, and treating myself to pottery courses.

Thank you Susannah! Look out for the next emails in this series coming on Wednesday and Friday. And I would love to know: is this something you have experienced? How do you deal with it?