Leaving people you actually like…

Like visiting a house no longer a home.

Part 9 in this series.

I came to the university I was just ejected from at their request. When the call came, I was teaching at another school. On the water in San Diego of all places.

But this was my alma mater.

And so I took the job, a chance to work in the place where professors had helped a lost 19-year-old me find direction. The decision felt (and still feels) right. But it also makes leaving much harder.

Many of my colleagues were once teachers and mentors of mine. I made friendships over my decade there; celebrated and grieved life’s milestones with many of those people.

Being cut off from all these friends has me thinking about what it is to leave behind people we actually like when a job ends. Call me sentimental, but this is one of the externalities of being laid off, an emotional cost paid by former employees their company will never see.

Sure, that’s life. Sure, the internet and coffee shops still exist for continuing those relationships. Sure, none are promised more than the season we get with people. As Frost put it, “way leads on to way.”

But we all know what happens at the end of school. We say we’ll keep in touch, believe our lives will remain interconnected. But that doesn’t always (or often) hold true, especially when leaving the daily rhythms of those relationships was not our choice.

And so, we need to grieve. But what does that look like in a professional context?

For me, it meant writing my closest peers a letter, by hand, letting them know what I was specifically grateful for when it comes to their place in my life. I left them on their desks late the night I finished packing up my office.

Did they make the pain of leaving less? Not really.

Am I seeing some of the early signs of the post-separation drift I described above? Yes.

The wash and tide of my new stage of life pulls at me every day. I just hope it doesn’t wash me ashore so far from my past I have to carry it for myself.