Losing a position or role doesn’t just cost you an income. If you’re an academic, it can cost you a community, a sense of purpose, and a story about who you are. Professional identity gives us belonging, but it can also set us apart, tying our sense of self to something that was never entirely ours to keep. I know this because I lived it, and the framework that helped me make sense of it didn’t come from a career coach. It came from grief theory.
When academic roles end abruptly, a contract isn’t renewed, a department restructures, a post is made redundant, the emotional fallout is usually treated as an administrative problem. HR processes the paperwork. A union might handle a grievance. Almost nobody addresses what actually keeps people up at night: the loss of an identity built over years, sometimes decades, woven so tightly into who we are that losing the role can feel like losing part of ourselves. It helps to separate what happened from how it felt, and from what it now means for who you are.
That gap is where grief theory earns its place. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance were developed to describe the emotional process of dying, not job loss. But the model is a useful primer, and Kübler-Ross herself later extended the framework to cover other significant life losses, including job and income loss. The stages map on to professional loss surprisingly well, not because a position is a person but because for many academics, identity and role are tightly fused. When the role goes, something that felt like “self” goes with it.
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This isn’t only about redundancy. The same disorientation shows up after graduation, retirement, resignation or a role that quietly disappears through restructuring you had no say in. It intensifies when the ending feels unfair, like institutional politics or scapegoating, a suspicion the decision wasn’t really about you. Then the emotional weight can outlast the practical fallout, long after HR has closed the file.
The stages don’t arrive in order, and you don’t tick them off one by one. What helped me more than theory was turning it into a practical exercise: short, structured journaling, answered in single words or short phrases rather than essays. The brevity matters. It stops the exercise turning into another spiral of rumination and instead turns feelings into something concrete enough to examine.
A journaling framework for role loss
I’d suggest working through these prompts across several sittings, not all at once:
- What did the role give you? Purpose, value, identity, belonging, structure, community, a title, a sense of expertise. Be specific rather than generic.
- What did you lose? Status is different from routine, which is different from belonging. Naming the loss precisely makes it easier to grieve, and easier to see what wasn’t actually lost at all.
- If the ending felt unjust, what’s underneath the anger? And what do you wish for those involved? You don’t need to resolve this quickly; naming it, rather than suppressing it, is what allows it to shift.
- What can you already acknowledge with gratitude? Even a difficult ending, and the role itself, usually taught you something, or opened a door you wouldn’t otherwise have walked through. And what did the actions of others teach you about your own values and boundaries going forward?
- What do you want your next professional identity to look like? What will you carry forward, what will you leave behind, and what would re-entering the field on your own terms involve?
None of these need a counsellor to answer, although one can help if the loss was particularly acute or contested. What they do need is honesty, and permission to feel things that don’t fit neatly into a LinkedIn update.
Why the format matters
Short answers work better than long reflection here. When I did this exercise myself, one thing that emerged was a short poem, written not for publication but to externalise what I couldn’t otherwise say aloud. A line from it has stayed with me since: the reminder that they only silence you if you let them. I’m not suggesting everyone needs to write poetry. The point is to get the unspoken on to the page, where you can examine it, rather than being swept along by it. Something built over a lifetime doesn’t unravel, or rebuild, overnight. However, exercises like this support emotional regulation, self-compassion and a gradual shift towards acceptance.
What this changes
None of this restores the role. What it does is stop you waiting for the institution, your former colleagues or your CV to tell you who you are next. Academics are trained to build careful, evidenced arguments about almost everything except themselves. Applying that same rigour to your own transition is often what moves you from feeling stuck to moving forward.
If you’re navigating a role loss right now, you don’t need to have this figured out. You just need somewhere to put it down. Start with one question, in one sentence, today.
Victoria E. Gibbon is a professor of biological anthropology based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Acknowledgements: The author acknowledges the use of an AI-based editorial tool to assist with grammar refinement, clarity improvements and formatting suggestions. All final content, ideas and interpretations are her own.
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