The selves we leave behind

I've been reading Didier Eribon's book* about loss and identity. One passage stopped me, not because it's about death - though it is - but because it captures something I see regularly in career transitions.

Eribon writes: "We are not quite the same person depending on whom we are with: a relative, a close friend, a colleague from work." Our identity, he argues, is plural and composite - constituted through relationships and the roles we play with different people. When those relationships end, we lose not just the person but the role itself. And with it, part of who we are.

Applied to professional life, this explains something I've noticed but struggled to name. When people leave long careers - particularly senior roles in firms or organisations - they don't just lose a job title. They lose the version of themselves that existed in relation to colleagues, clients, the organisation itself.

"Partner George" - the person colleagues turned to when X happened, who clients called about Y, who sat in particular meetings and held particular relationships - ceases to exist. Not because I've changed, but because the relational context that constituted that identity is gone. Those people, those conversations, those roles - they created a version of me that no longer has anywhere to exist.

The same applies to anyone leaving a long-held professional identity. The "senior lawyer" or "managing partner" or "department head" you were existed in relation to specific people in specific contexts. Remove those relationships and that self simply . . . disappears.

This isn't the same as losing status or missing the work, though both may be true. It's more fundamental. It's the discovery that significant parts of who you were only existed in relation to others, and when those relationships end - even by choice - those parts of yourself go with them.

Eribon writes: "It takes time to shed a social 'role' and the identity that was consubstantial with it. Perhaps such a 'role' even haunts us forever."

I think he's right. The professional self doesn't disappear cleanly just because you've left. It haunts you. Not because you want to go back, necessarily, but because a part of who you were is simply . . . gone. And grieving that loss - acknowledging it exists - is harder than we expect.

Perhaps particularly when the departure was your choice.

*Didier Eribon, The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman (trans. Michael Lucey) (Allen Lane, 2025)