Dear Grief Guide, Loss Made Me Lose All Motivation To Work

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

Can grief make you lose the will to work?

My father-in-law passed away earlier this year,

And now my aunt,

Who basically raised me,

Is about to pass from complications related to COVID,

Which is currently surging in our state.

These losses have shifted my focus entirely to spending time with family and friends.

Everything else feels meaningless.

I find myself staring at my computer for hours,

Unable to concentrate or care about my responsibilities.

Before experiencing loss,

I was driven and ambitious,

Taking pride in my job and trying to climb the ladder at the small data entry and analytics firm where I work.

Now everything feels pointless.

I can't summon the energy or the interest to complete even the simplest tasks.

My performance has plummeted,

And I worry about how long I can maintain my professional standards before it starts affecting my job security.

I'm writing to you because I don't know how to start caring about work again.

How do I find motivation to do my job when everything,

Except my relationships with people I love,

Feel stupid and empty?

How can I reclaim a sense of purpose and drive when my grief has drained all my energy and enthusiasm for life,

Especially at work?

Any recommendations or strategies to help me regain my professional footing would be greatly appreciated.

Signed,

Checked Out Corporate Stiff Hi there,

Checked Out.

I hear you.

I see you.

There are so many people I work with,

Hmm,

Work with,

Who are like,

How are grief and work supposed to coexist,

And plot twist,

They are not.

I'm not sure where you're writing in from,

But especially for westernized,

Eurocentric,

Colonized societies where capitalism reigns supreme,

The structure and system of capitalism is not designed to coexist with grief.

Because capitalism tells you that what matters is money and gain and progress,

Growth is up and to the right,

And everything else is failure.

And grief reminds you that what matters most is love and quality time and the relationships you build with other people.

The two,

Inherently,

By design,

By nature,

Are not compatible.

In terms of practical questions,

I need you to answer,

Checked Out.

Do you need to be working right now?

This is a question that comes with an enormous amount of privilege.

It is a luxury to not have to work in a capitalistic society.

Can you take time off?

Can you take time away?

Can you take a mental health break if you're in the United States?

Can you take something called FMLA,

Family Marriage and Leave Act?

You can look into this,

Especially if you work for some place that's pretty corporate.

Do you have the privilege and the luxury of stepping away from work even for a season?

Even for a week or two?

Especially if you can take more than a month?

The other thing I have to say,

If you cannot step away from your job at the moment,

If you can't afford to,

If you're not in a place to,

If it's a busy season right now,

If you must work,

What is the bare minimum of your role?

Please go back and look at your employment contract,

If you have one,

And dear God,

I hope you have one.

What is the bare minimum of what you're required to do right now?

This is where it's enormously helpful,

And I do this with so many of my grieving clients,

Not just for work,

But for day to day in life after loss.

Make a have-to list versus a could-do list.

I have to do this by the end of the day in order to meet a deadline,

In order to be considered productive by my boss and coworkers,

In order to satisfy a client need,

In order to complete a project that I started.

That is the have-to list.

The could-do list is everything else.

This is the sprinkles,

This is the bonuses,

These are the optional extra miles you could be putting in,

The extra tasks,

The extra hours,

The extra networking opportunities that you do not need in order to maintain the role you are in right now.

You say that your performance is plummeting.

How do you get yourself back to a baseline?

What does baseline maintenance of the position that you're holding in right now,

What does that look like?

I want to invite you to check out,

To consider job hopping when you have more energy to devote,

To searching for a job,

Because so many grieving people tell me,

Especially those that continue to be in the workforce after a loss,

Because many of the people I work with are still young,

And in this,

The year of our Lord,

2024,

We still have to work in order to exist.

So many people in the aftermath of loss end up finding jobs with more meaning,

With more purpose,

With more human connection than jobs they previously held prior to a devastating loss.

One of my favorite examples is somebody who was in my course,

Life After Loss Academy,

And when she enrolled,

She was grieving the death of her father,

And her mother was dying from dementia in a nursing home during COVID.

So I imagine she would resonate very greatly with your story of caring for your aunt.

She approached management several times about what she needed in order to be able to take care of her mother and to also grieve her father,

Who was a very recent loss in her life.

But both parent figures,

The foundations of her existence,

Were either dead or dying.

Her foundations were crumbling underneath her and she needed more support than she was getting from work.

And what they essentially told her was that her grief was not welcome in the workplace and she needed to maintain the same level of productivity after that she had in the before.

And this,

I gotta tell you,

Was exhausting.

It was not sustainable and it was not leading her to a life,

Ultimately,

That she wanted to build or to continue living after loss.

So what we worked on together,

And this happens in the Established Module of Life After Loss Academy,

This is the fourth out of five steps that I teach in the Grief Method,

G-R-I-E-F,

Established Module.

It's where we talk about doing grief with others because grief does not happen in a vacuum and those others include co-workers,

Bosses,

Managers,

And even people who are under you.

If you have a hierarchical workplace,

How do you orient to doing grief in the space?

Is this grief welcoming?

How do you make it more grief welcoming?

If it's not,

How do you make an exit?

And one of Julia's requirements for finding a new job,

She's like,

I want to work with people who know what it means to grieve and I want to do something that feels calming to my nervous system because the place where she currently was,

Was not.

And she sent me an email more than six months after she'd taken Life After Loss Academy and she said,

Shelby,

You're not going to believe it.

I have switched jobs.

I have found a workplace I love.

It's much more intimate.

It's just me and two other women.

But these two other women are widows,

So they know what it means to grieve and we,

The three of us,

Together,

We're not in corporate,

We're not climbing ladders,

We're not trying to get a startup off the ground.

We are selling tea.

And one of her grounding rituals that we worked on together in the ground module of Life After Loss Academy,

Which is the first one that I teach,

In creating a safe place for herself and her grief and her life,

One of the rituals she chose for herself was drinking tea.

And so to go from a place where she was forced to be productive,

Where her grief was not welcome,

Where she was not given any human allowances for her loss and her pain,

To go from that to a place where her grief was not only welcome but embraced,

And to do an activity that grounded her nervous system and connected her with her community and the people around her,

It was a total life overhaul transformation.

That is what she learned and took away from Life After Loss Academy,

And it is still impacting her positively to this day.

I heard from her less than a month ago.

So if a job switch,

Even to a role,

Even to a path that you may have never previously considered is possible for you,

I encourage you to look in that direction,

Especially if you can brainstorm what your other gifts or what your other interests might be in the company of others who already get your grief.

Trusted friends,

Trusted family members,

People in your life who see you for you,

Grief included.

The last thing I want to offer you here is,

If you must stay where you are,

If you cannot leave,

If this is your reality right now,

In this season,

For the time being,

Applying those prepositional phrases to it,

It might be helpful when you're sitting at your desk to have some sort of picture,

If you're allowed to keep personal items at work,

Some sort of post-it note,

Some sort of pop-up message on your calendar at the same time every day that offers you your why.

Why are you still in this job?

Why do you need to make the money you're making?

Why are you working with these people,

Doing this role,

Day in and day out?

Do you do this for the barbecues with your family?

Do you do this for the game nights?

Do you do this for the family trips,

The moments where you do get to get away?

Do you do this so that you can take time off for funerals and memorials?

Do you do this so you can leave a legacy for family members or children,

Oftentimes leaning into the what in the hell am I doing here,

The why of it,

Can help the actual tasks feel maybe not more bearable,

Maybe not easier,

But more purposeful.

And infusing your life with meaning at a time when everything feels meaningless is one of the greatest ways to encourage yourself to keep going at a time when that can feel really,

Really hard.

I totally hear where you are right now.

I am so sorry.

This blanket statement to everyone listening right now,

That we are required to work in a world where we inherently grieve and experience loss and we have no choice in the matter.

It truly breaks my heart.

It is one of the great things that breaks my heart about being a human on the planet right now.

And I hope someday that will not be true.

I hope that we make robots and AI smart enough not to write screenplays for us because we have so many brilliant minds that do that,

But who actually do the work that needs doing so that we can have more time with the people who matter to us and doing the things that matter to our hearts.

I see you corporate stiff.

I'm right there with you.

And I hope these really practical tips and tools help as you continue to navigate the workplace with grief.