Failure (and Success) as Grief

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Grief can feel like an endless falling: its monosyllabic punch casts the sufferer into a blackness so complete that there appears no reasonable way out. Its idea is often applied to the depths of human suffering, almost incalculable on the commonplace scale.

Grief spoken of in everyday conversation is the death of a lifetime partner, whose being was so entwined with your own the two cannot be picked apart, and so with the demise of the other comes the ultimate failure of the whole.

Failing to get a job interviewed for is not that grief. And yet the repercussions followed the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross classic five stages of grief, albeit as a sprinkling of rain to its bigger, bolder, angrier brother, monsoon: it left me damp rather than sodden.

Therefore, it needs a different name – an expansion of ‘pre-grief’ perhaps, already taken to refer to anticipatory grief? So ‘gef’ then, for something lighter that rolls off the tongue, just as it rolled into my life as a three-week emotional sine wave in August. With its lightness came also a crystal clear observation that within my downfall there was a ‘model for success’ in opposite feelings to each of the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Gef then is light, ultimately a successful process, and one which was quick unlike the grief experience of a colleague of mine who at the death of her father acknowledged ten desperate, grinding years of anger that at the lightest touch could combust into a fiery rage or teary gloom.

In my case, after nine years part-time in a university department, I mistakenly thought I was the natural and obvious choice for the permanent role when it became available.

It was not so.

Let me be clear – I was a good choice, but university academic roles have a political component, meaning the department is looking to its future and ideally has a vision for how that might role out. That is my nicest explanation for what happened; but I have plenty of less generous ones too, some shamefully irrelevant despite my itching to share them.

Let me take you back to the beginning of August:

Denial

Whispers that the lecturer role was not going to be mine came down the corridor like tumbleweed. ‘That surely isn’t correct,’ I reasoned, having had a snippet of overheard conversation decoded by a #team-me colleague. Maybe the department would ultimately hire two people in the position and open up the research possibilities. In that, I felt optimism.

Anger

A week on when human resources still hadn’t e-mailed me, I seethed in a small office feeling the ego-entitlement of nine years on the coal face, having done many of the tasks the new job would encompass only without a proper salary and benefits. My anger caused me to ping-pong between effusive proclamations of how the courses would fail under new leadership, and my longing for the deeper learning of complex interactions and communication skills in healthcare students. In that, I felt elated.

Bargaining

Within days of the confirmation that the old office was to be cleared for the new arrival, I constructed possibilities for myself: I would offer to continue lecturing in my specialist area and thus demonstrate how crucial I was. More than that, I had fictional conversations with the department in which my pioneering agenda suddenly exploded in their realization like a supernova. I had tapped into the zeitgeist and in my head, people beamed at my brilliance and our chests inflated with easy laughter. In that, I felt pro-active.

Depression

By the middle of the following week, I crashed. I wasn’t depressed in the clinical sense, but I felt morose. My smile became a mask and it hurt my jaw. I forlornly began internet searches for ‘postdocs at the Oxford Internet Institute’ and started pouring over exemplary academic profiles that revealed an incomprehensible and brilliance too slippery for me to grasp completely. How the hell had they published in so many areas – and managed to work in industry?! Behind this, however, I was supercharged by my work on emerging theories of professionalism, and an outline I had written for my next novel manuscript. In that, I felt fulfilled.

Acceptance

When my new colleague arrived, we shook hands and something inside me felt relieved not to be moving into the low-lit office after all. The place now looked sad to me, like the abandoned bedroom of a child who had left for university, the posters on the wall from a previous era, the coins on the unwiped dresser too few for even a packet of crisps…but nobody throws away money, literally, do they?! It will take some time for a new colleague to understand the department and its needs. I on the other hand happily continued my teaching at the beginning of the semester, and unburdened by the confirmation of my ‘failure’ I got to reading up on some new research areas. In that, I felt success.

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It could be the eternal optimist in me, but I’m truly intrigued by my emotional experience, and thus the case for gef. I have in the past felt grief in its truest sense – so I knew this to be different – but developing coping strategies for life and articulating them continues to be both a professional and personal fascination. I see emotional experiences as positive, and this one had cracked open a kernel of wisdom – that emotions are spherical and in each proposition, there is the presence of the exact opposite: and that in a mildly agonizing loss I had found a route to articulating something new in myself.

I do want to make a distinction though – offerings of the well-meaning balm ‘You’ll find something better’ annoyed me, yet they were meant to be helpful. I found them throwaway, as though friends were rushing my irritation. It wasn’t beneficial to try to pave over the cracks so quickly. I needed to experience my own process. I needed to get used to my acceptance of having lost out on a good opportunity. I still think it is a great job, only it’s not going to be mine. What I will achieve, I believe, is ‘something else’. The notion of finding something ‘better’ is actually a state-of-mind, and so I will be looking for something I accept and that I am happy to frame as success. That, for me, is the power of understanding gef.

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