Mourning

We tend to associated mourning with the death of a loved one, but that’s only one meaning of the word. One can mourn the loss of anything, including a working relationship. A business partnership that has endured for 14 years is over. And I feel the loss. 14 years is enough for it to work itself into your identity.

And that the relationship ended badly? That doesn’t help. It carries with it the sting of rejection. It’s been a while since I felt that one. I haven’t broken up with a romantic partner since early 1999. Probably the last time I can close was in 2011, when I was made redundant from RBI. That, though, wasn’t personal. The company was moving away from editorial — so it didn't need an editorial change expert.

This is, to some degree, personal. The new owner of the business does not like the way I do something. I am not prepared to go against everything I’ve learned over 20 years, to appease someone else. Impasse. The only way to solve it?

End the relationship.

The legacy of loss

Hence, the mourning.

But I know how to cope with loss. Both my parents are long gone, and we lost a child late in pregnancy. This is a small, trivial thing compared to those. But it’s real.

A relationship that has been one of the two backbones of my self-employed era is gone. The company which pivoted brilliantly alongside me, to survive the pandemic when all my other work was disappearing, is no longer my partner. We’re pivoting away from each other into an uncertain future.

However, as my wife pointed out, this is very much a “Ship of Theseus” situation. There is nobody at the company in question who worked there when I entered the partnership. The last point of continuity was the founder, who sold up seven months ago, triggering the precipitous decline in my working relationship with the new owner. The company I had the relationship with died months ago, and the new company has no respect for my skills, my experience, and my knowledge.

So the relationship is over. It was over months ago – but we’ve only just got around to burying it.

Moving on

So, I mourn the company I used to work with. There’s not much of it left, bar a URL, some content and some of the same business model.

But what I don’t want to do – if I can avoid it, is lose the part of it that mattered the most. No, not the income, but the chance to do a certain type of work, with a certain type of person.

Therefore, once this period of mourning is done, that’s next on my agenda. I need to find a new way to bring what I used to do to market. And that’s just what I’ll do.

Like everyone who has suffered a loss, I mourn, I move on, and I create something new.