Work & Identity
Who are you when you no longer have a job title?
The title was useful shorthand. It was never the whole answer.
Find something to read
Search the journal.
A phrase, a feeling, or a question. Look through all our current writing.
Browse all 13 articles below, or search for something specific.
Life in Transition
Starting over at 40 when this wasn’t the plan
The difficult part is often the distance between where you are and where you thought you would be.
Life in Transition
When you’ve moved and have nobody to call yet
Belonging rarely arrives at once. It gathers through ordinary, repeated contact.
Work & Identity
Rebuilding confidence after a layoff, one ordinary task at a time
Confidence can return as evidence: small, real things you can point to and say you handled.
Relationships
How to ask for support when you don’t need advice
Clear language for asking someone to listen, keep you company or help with one practical thing.
Relationships
What to say when the advice keeps coming
Short, direct scripts for stopping unwanted advice without turning your boundary into a debate.
Work & Identity
Grieving a job you didn’t even like
You can be relieved it is over and still miss the life that came with it.
Work & Identity
An empty calendar is not an empty life
What happens when the meetings disappear, and your time is finally your own?
Life in Transition
What to do in the first 72 hours after an unwanted change
Protect what needs attention today. Give the bigger questions a little more time.
Life in Transition
The urge to perform resilience for an audience
You are allowed to feel a thing without turning it into content.
Relationships
The difference between support and advice
Sometimes the most useful thing someone can offer is their company.
Work & Identity
Your skills did not resign with you
A job can end. The things you learned how to do come with you.
Work & Identity
The first twenty-five cents
Day-labor jobs. Websites built at night. Robert Nichols on the small experiment that followed a job loss.
No writing matches that search yet. Try “work”, “change”, or “help”.