Seeing the reports about the BBC moving jobs around the country (i.e. making people redundant) reminds me it’s three years since I was told my job at BBC Three was moving to Birmingham.
Even though the move had been long-planned, the news still hurt. It meant I wasn’t needed.
I spent time wondering what I’d done wrong. Yes, I’d filmed some virally successful pilots, but the channel hadn’t wanted to turn them into series. Maybe I should worked with the current development team better? Or maybe I did something that annoyed the controller? Maybe I shouldn’t have left early to do those nursery pickups.
For months after I’d left the job I’d find a little employment tribunal starting up in my mind. Sometimes I’d be angrily defending my record, explaining all the things that were not my fault. At other times, I’d find myself admitting and agreeing with every possible toxic accusation of failure my brain could come up with. Usually during the day things would be quiet but at night the never ending court-case would start up again. (Last month I was reading The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway and circled this sentence: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”)
The truth is I wasn’t very happy at BBC Three. There’s not really a good reason for that — the wage was good, I got to make interesting films, no-one bullied me — but I spent a lot of time feeling miserable. For that reason I should have felt pleased it was ending (I should have quit!) but instead when I was told my job was moving, I felt like was being dumped.
Most people have experienced some kind of relationship break-up, but while we have love songs and advice columns for this experience, I don’t think we talk enough about career break-ups.
If you’re one of those who has had bad news this week, maybe you’re just angry or worried about finances and so on. But I just want to say that if there’s also a feeling of rejection in there, I relate.
I could tell you that that there are “plenty more fish in the sea” and “you’ll be fine” (and yes a post-BBC life turned out to be much better for me) but that probably won’t help with the feeling of being broken up with.
For me, two things helped a bit. One was deciding to come up with my own reason for the breakup. In my case I decided it was because the job was a move away from making films towards the world of commissioning, execs and management. Filmmaking (and teaching/helping others) was my core thing. This helped give the break-up a positive frame, regardless of whether it was strictly True or not.
The other thing was to realise that, like a relationship break-up, the pain would fade over time. Physical wounds can take a long time to heal, but usually there comes a time when you’ve gone weeks without thinking about it. Before you know i you’ll be in a new “relationship” and the pain will be left in the past.