I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who had Inside Out on auto-repeat during 2020 and 2021. I’ve been accused sometimes of being an ice queen* because I just find it hard to process what I’m feeling in the moment – but I do feel it. It just sometimes takes a little while to feel it. So, while the world was collapsing around me, I kept a stiff upper lip, kept calm and carried on, was there to hold everyone else’s emotions – and tried not to let my struggles show. Then, when I logged off for the day, I watched Inside Out and – when Sadness and Joy got lost in the memory stacks and the control panel froze up, and the little girl didn’t even respond to Anger anymore, and she marches unflinchingly through stealing her mother’s credit card and packing her backpack and going to that horrible bus station and climbing on the busy – my tears started flowing. One night, I made my husband watch it twice in a row: as soon as the credits ended, I hit play again.

Then I had to switch over to books because he couldn’t watch it anymore. Emily of New Moon, where Emily is forced by the hard-ass aunt who is adopting after the death of Emily’s father (in chapter 1) to pick one cat out of her clowder to bring with her to the new home she doesn’t want. She begs and pleads but her aunt uses this as a chance to establish precedence. Emily picks, not the easiest cat to love, but the cat she is afraid no one else will love. And then she finds out later that the unchosen cat has died.

Or Two Stories about Kate & Kitty, where Kate and her kitty are inseparable until the family moves. The car is packed up, the moving van ready to go, and Kate can’t find Kitty anywhere. She searches and calls, but Kitty doesn’t respond and the family has to go, now. Finally, Kate unpacks the can opener and opens a tin of catfood – and then hears a tiny scritch-scratch from a cabinet they had emptied that morning. And Kate and Kitty are reunited. Whew!

For people who take themselves seriously and can’t access their inner child as easily as I do, one of the best books on grief and change is William Bridges’ The Way of Transition. Those of us who practice Change Management know William Bridges from his books, Transitions and Managing Transitions, core change management books. One of his stories that sticks with me and shapes my approach is from Managing Transitions. In this story, he describes a study that occurred at a large manufacturer – so large that, when they closed one plant, thousands of middle managers were laid off. Thousands!

They split the laid off managers into two groups. One group got standard out-placement: support groups, resume services, interview coaching, etc. The other group got exactly the same thing – plus, they were asked to do one more thing: write for 20 minutes a day. They could write about what they wanted to do, how they felt about being laid off or their struggles with finding a new job, the challenges that being unemployed created for their family or their psyche. They could write over and over with the obsessive repetitiveness of Jack in The Shining, “I don’t have anything to write and I don’t want to write today.” They didn’t have to share what they wrote – they just had to do it. Consistently. 20 minutes per day.

When the results were measured six months later, the numbers were startlingly clear: the managers who hadn’t written had gotten re-employed at the standard rate; the managers who wrote 20 minutes a day had re-employment rates that were statistically significantly higher.

Anyway, when I was going through a change of my own, a change that required me to leave behind the person I had been for 31 years, I reached for Bridges. And discovered The Way of Transition: Embracing Life’s Most Difficult Moments, in which he describes his own personal journey through transition. He describes watching his wife suffer as she dies from cancer. Made more complicated for him by the fact that their marriage was a delicate point when she was diagnosed – she had just confessed that she had been unfaithful to him.

His struggle is made even more complex by the fact that he is The Guy who understands how to deal with difficult transitions. His experience makes him question everything he thought he knew about transitions and change management and all the principles he had espoused and taught for all those years. So, on top of his conflicted emotions, on top of the long and painful loss of his wife**, he is questioning everything he believed about his professional life.

This is a beautiful book and I often recommend it to people who have left – voluntarily or involuntarily – organizations that they had emotionally committed to for long periods of their lives.

Because sometimes you just need to cry and let it all out. And it’s helpful to have someone along to help you figure out what to do when the tears have run out.

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^{*Well, one guy called me that to my face. I don’t blame him; he needed someone to hit. We were in a meeting where his boss had just told him that she was moving someone off his team because he had started dating her. The boss wanted me in the room to cool the temperature off if it got too hot. When I tried to do that, he called me an ice queen. And I responded – bon mot, not! – “That has nothing to do with this!”}

^{**When someone dies after a long illness, we often say, “I wish it had happened faster.” And when they die suddenly, we say, “I wish we could have had more time to say goodbye.” I’ve lost slow and I’ve lost fast and, truth is, it sucks either way. It just sucks. Wish all you want, wishing it were different won’t make it suck any less.}