Author
James Reeves
Lived experience: job loss and recovery
James Reeves spent two years navigating job loss and early recovery at the same time. The job loss came first and felt, to people around him, like a practical problem with a practical solution. What it actually was: a collapse of the identity he had built his adult life around. He writes about financial crisis, the particular shame of losing a career in a culture that ties worth to productivity, and the isolation that comes from a kind of loss that does not look like loss. He found the research on ambiguous loss -- losses without the social recognition of death -- more useful than anything aimed at job seekers.
Articles by James Reeves
Job Loss and Identity: When What You Do Is Part of Who You Are
For many people, their job title was also their identity. When a job ends, especially suddenly, the question underneath everything is: who am I without this?
Recovery Is Not Linear: What That Actually Means
Recovery does not move in a straight line. If you are further in and it just got harder, or you had a setback after a good stretch, this is what is actually happening.
Financial Recovery After Bankruptcy: The Emotional Side No One Talks About
Bankruptcy ends a financial chapter. The emotional one takes longer. The shame, the identity questions, and the grief that bankruptcy actually produces.
The Job Search Is Emotional Labor — and Nobody Warns You About That
Applying for jobs while grieving a job is its own specific kind of exhausting. Why the job search takes so much more out of you than it should, and why that is not weakness.
When the New Job Doesn't Fix It
You got the new job. You thought that would be the turning point. It was not. Why the practical solution does not automatically resolve the emotional one.
Identity in Recovery: Who Are You Without It?
Getting sober changes more than your relationship with a substance. It changes who you are and how you see yourself. What the identity shift in recovery actually feels like.
Early Recovery: What to Actually Expect in the First Months
The first 3 months of recovery are unlike any other phase. Not just physically. An honest account of what most people experience and when it starts to shift.
What Financial Crisis Does to Relationships
Money stress doesn't stay in your bank account. It gets into your relationships, your marriage, your friendships, your family dynamics. Here's the honest picture of how financial crisis reshapes the people around you — and what to do with that.
Surviving Financial Freefall: When You Don't Know How Bad It Will Get
The hardest financial crisis isn't the one that's resolved — it's the one that's still happening. When you're in the middle and can't see the bottom, that uncertainty is its own particular kind of hard.
Matrescence: The Identity Shift No One Warned You About
Becoming a parent changes who you are at a fundamental level. There is a word for this. And understanding it might be the most useful thing you read this year.
The First Holiday Without Them
Everyone around you is celebrating. And you are carrying something no one can see. The first holiday after a death is its own kind of grief.
Anticipatory Grief: Mourning Someone Who Is Still Here
Grief does not only come after a death. It can arrive long before, while someone is still alive, as a kind of preparation the heart does without asking permission.
The First Death Anniversary
Everyone talks about the first year of grief. Almost no one talks about the day it ends. The first anniversary of a death is its own specific kind of hard.
Mother's Day When Your Mom Is Dead
Every flower shop and brunch reservation is a reminder. Mother's Day after a loss is one of the hardest days of the year, and you are allowed to say so.
Disenfranchised Grief: When the World Does Not Recognize Your Loss
Some losses do not receive the social permission to grieve that others do. The death of an estranged parent. A miscarriage. A pet. An addiction. The end of something that was never officially a relationship. This is for those losses.
The Identity Crisis Nobody Told Me Came With a Diagnosis
A serious diagnosis changes how you see yourself. Before and after. Sick person and well person. The one you used to be and the one you are now.
Newly Diagnosed at 30
A serious diagnosis in your 20s or 30s hits differently. Your peers are building careers and families. You are navigating a medical reality none of them can see.
First Mother's Day Postpartum When You Do Not Feel Like a Mother Yet
The world is celebrating you as a mother. And you are not sure you have found her yet. The first Mother's Day postpartum can feel like a holiday you have not earned.
Financial Crisis and Shame: What You're Feeling Is Normal
The shame that comes with financial collapse is real, specific, and different from other kinds of grief. Here is what it actually feels like, why it works the way it does, and why it is not a verdict on your worth.
After a Relapse: What It Means and What It Doesn't
A relapse is not the end of recovery. It is not proof that recovery is impossible for you. Here is what the research says about relapse, what it tends to mean, and how people move through it.
All articles on DeeplyHeard are written by people with lived experience of the transitions they describe. Read our editorial standards.