When You No Longer Recognize Yourself Inside the Work

I’ve been thinking about moral injury again recently, although not in the way I usually have. In the past I often approached it through the lens of staff care, leadership, or the experiences I was hearing from others. This time it has felt more personal.

I stepped away from writing for several months. Part of that was grief after losing my husband. Part of it was moving through a difficult period at work that involved leadership strain, uncertainty, and decisions with very real human consequences. I remember one day after several difficult conversations sitting at my desk (also known as my dining room table) and realizing something felt off. Not with the work itself. I still cared deeply about it. I still believed in it. But I felt strangely disconnected from myself inside it.

At first, I assumed it was exhaustion…that was the easiest explanation. We use the language of burnout so often now that it becomes the container for almost everything. And certainly there was tiredness, grief, and cumulative stress. But the more I sat with it, the less I thought this was only about energy.

What I was wrestling with felt closer to identity, my identity.

That is one reason moral injury has stayed with me over the years. Increasingly I think of it not only as distress connected to values, betrayal, or ethical conflict, but also as a loss of recognition. The experience of looking at your work, your role, or even yourself and quietly realizing that something no longer feels familiar.

I hear versions of this in conversations all the time. People talk about feeling flatter than they used to. More guarded. Less connected. Sometimes they wonder if they have become cynical. I’m not always sure that is the right word. I wonder whether some people are grieving.

Not only personal grief…professional grief too. Grief for teams that changed, grief for trust that was damaged, grief for colleagues who left, even grief for ways of working that once felt more human. Sometimes, I think, there is also grief for earlier versions of ourselves.

Humanitarian work changes people. Leadership changes people too. I understand that differently now than I used to. The last year gave me more compassion for leadership constraints, trade-offs, and the loneliness that can come with carrying decisions that affect people you care about. But understanding complexity has not made me less concerned about harm. If anything, it has made me more attentive to it.

One thing I keep coming back to is how quickly we normalize adaptation. We become practical. Capable. Reliable. We keep moving because people need us to. Sometimes that is exactly what the moment requires. But I wonder whether there are times when adaptation quietly becomes concealment and competence starts hiding loss.

I think moral injury asks us to look at more than coping. It asks whether people still recognize themselves inside the work they are doing. It asks what they have been carrying, what they have absorbed, and what may have been left behind in order to stay.

I do not have neat answers to this. I am still thinking it through myself. But I keep returning to one question:

How many people are carrying grief for versions of themselves they lost at work without realizing that is what they are mourning?

And if that is happening, what responsibility follows from it?

Holding space with care and solidarity…here’s to staying whole, together,
~ Kate

Thanks for reading The Olive Pages: Fieldnotes on care, clarity, and staying whole

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KRC supports leaders, humanitarian professionals, and mission-driven organizations working at the intersection of well-being, leadership, change and humane systems. Through coaching, consulting, and reflective practice, we help people and organizations navigate complexity while staying human in the process.