There are some who advise to get one’s heart broken early and often.
Over the years, in romantic relationships, I have learned how to get dirty, fall down and pick myself up again. When embarking on a new potential dating escapade, I am mentally and emotionally prepared for some level of disappointment and heartache. I understand it comes with the territory of emotional vulnerability and risk.
But this year, I got a whole new round of lessons in the school of the heart by something lesser-known but still deadly: professional heartbreak.
At 58, it feels late to be learning this lesson. Maybe that’s because I spent so many years placing my conceptual eggs in the baskets of romantic love, motherhood and community. Until my daughter entered adulthood a decade ago, I don’t think I ever really invested my heart in a job, not until the past six years, as I’ve been working in the capacity of social work with transitional age youth.
From early on, I observed that youth in our culture are poorly served through deficits in the structure of public education, including a lack of emotional wellness support. In the beginning, I obviously could not have articulated it that way.
Instead, I would have said that sitting at desks at that age was pure lunacy and that between the ages of 12 and 16, we should have all been learning hands-on skills, living in the wilderness and developing survival techniques, doing community service, being guided to overcome our emotional isolation from one another and learning how to self-regulate our feelings.
I discovered transformative arts in college, which offered creative, philosophical, spiritual and non-clinical solutions. These are the most effective and powerful antidotes to the hollowness at the heart of our culture.
Like most idealists, finding a place to apply this base of skills and knowledge outside my degree program was another story. My education predisposed me to serve in the lean alleyway between clinical therapy, education and the arts, a difficult needle to thread. So, when I landed in workforce development, I was shocked to discover a real affinity for the calling.
It is a place to apply all the tools I honed in a profoundly practical approach to career and education coaching. The component of a pragmatic goal is a fantastic crucible for providing effective support to struggling humans. In this newly found career niche, my heart opened to a calling.
I fell in love with my job, the organization where I worked, my clients and the opportunity to make a significant, measurable difference in real-time to people struggling.
However, the context to provide this kind of support, funded by federal, state and local sources, comes only with specific strings attached. The underlying, hidden, implicit, politicized, personal and human strings took time to emerge and proved to be the heartbreaking mechanism concealed in the chowder.
An AI Google search defines “professional heartbreak” as a feeling of sadness or disappointment that can arise from several work-related experiences, including missed promotions, failed projects, rejected proposals, loss of trust or confidence, and loss of meaningful work.
On the surface, they could easily sound like just general complaints about the annoyances of being employed as a person in the real world. I’m aware of that. The old-school gremlin in my head shouts, well, that’s just having a job. Buck up, baby.
However, the depth of heartbreak is proportional to the depth of effectiveness I found as a youth social worker, which has been the most satisfying professional work I have done to date. I guess that speaks to (despite my regular declarations that I hate people) how much I care about people and how much I get from helping to make another person’s suffering a little less.
After months of waking up heartbroken, confused, enraged, stymied and impeded, attempting in every way I could think of to find guidance, to try working through it with the people in my organization, I finally came to the difficult decision to leave the job I loved so much. I just couldn’t live with being siloed from opportunities I knew existed. I couldn’t watch the work I had done be corrupted, coopted, mishandled and wasted by those in positions of authority.
Perhaps the worst was the feeling, while placing my heart on the line each day to support and comfort at-risk, marginalized and vulnerable clients, that my organization did not have my back. Instead, the people placed in that support and guidance role were manipulating and strategizing to benefit themselves primarily or other pet projects of their own, leaving the constituency I represent and for whom the funding exists to languish, not fully prioritized, not seen, not best supported.
I know many have walked through similar difficult situations. Perhaps many choose to stay and fight the good fight where they are, despite unjust conditions; despite people in management who have no business being there; despite layers of bureaucracy that require insane hoops, ridiculous rules, half measures at best, success that leads to punishment of those who bring it about or much, much worse.
Probably to many, I sound like the worst kind of Pollyanna, and they’re thinking, “Lady, what world did you think you lived in?” Maybe I’m just another “Karen” right now, complaining about how her white girl privilege got wrinkled like a Sunday frock. Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
But heartbreak, my people. I laid it all on the line. Like a 14-year-old girl with her first crush, I was making a difference. I don’t like the way these big girl panties fit my middle-aged derriere. Maybe some can relate.
In the end, the suggested solutions for how to cope with it have rung hollow a bit: Allow oneself to feel emotions, set boundaries, practice self-care, reconnect with interests, seek support and allow oneself to grieve. I’ve done all of the above since this emerged, and I’ve walked through it.
Yay, “Team Me,” for knowing how to care for myself. Those are the perks of being a professional social worker. We have mad skillz. But that last layer just won’t go away for me. Try washing it out. Try scrubbing it out. It’s like ring around the collar. So, I write. I put it here as a touchstone for anyone else walking through something similar. I should maybe share a copy with The White House. Ha ha. Just kidding.
We’re living through interesting times. I don’t know what the universe has in store for me as my next incarnation. My little idealist heart wants to build a little room where I can sit with people and just do what I’ve been doing, but without the toxic outliers that became the poison in the frog broth. Who knows; maybe I will.
But in the meantime, I’m growing a new layer of resilience designed for the world of work. I didn’t know I needed it. Take a page from me if possible. The world will break one’s heart in new ways. But it’s OK, as Leonard Cohen reminded us. It’s maybe “how the light gets in.”
Charrisa Drengsen writes the newsletter ‘NOVEL atelier’ at novelatelier.substack.com.
