Social Mobility
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mattyn1

Original Poster:

6,961 posts

182 months

Yesterday (10:29)
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Social Mobility is a big thing at the moment it seems - especially in my organisation. I was lucky enough to be invited to a Teams Dial in about it where the topic was how do we improve it within the military. I suppose the military is a good example of the broad perception that Social Mobility is an upward thing... but as I listened to the speakers about how the military has sent them upwards, I was struck that my experience had really sent my own spiralling down. It led me to write another article (I know... but it's good therapy for me) based on my experience and challenging the norm with regard to Social Mobility.

It was the "Depression" thread that got me thinking about posting this here...and not so much Social Mobility itself (although the perception it travels in one direction needs challenging), but about secondary after effects of bereavement. All tied into MH, hence why I have posted it here.

it is aimed at my organisation, but I think relevant in the wider spaces. And yes, I got help writing it... !!

I just hope it resonates with someone.

Edited by mattyn1 on Saturday 25th July 10:35

mattyn1

Original Poster:

6,961 posts

182 months

Yesterday (10:34)
quotequote all
The Shrinking World: How Grief Quietly Steals the Life You Thought You Still Had
By Mattyn1

I am a 56-year-old Royal Navy officer. Thirty-seven years in the service. I have walked into rooms full of Senior Officers and not flinched. I have managed crises at altitude, made decisions under pressure that in other walks of life would need a week and a committee to reach, and represented my service in environments that would make most people's palms sweat.

And yet, now, I cannot go into Waitrose on my own.

I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I need you to understand how absurd it sounds to me. A man who has spent nearly four decades being paid, in part, to project calm and authority in difficult situations — undone by a supermarket. Unable to navigate a shopping trolley past the bread without something in his chest seizing up and his feet wanting to take him back to the car park and the relative safety of sitting alone in my Volvo.

This is not the grief story people expect. The grief story people expect involves the big moments — the funeral, the first Christmas, the birthday. Those moments are terrible, and I have lived through all of them. But nobody warned me about Waitrose. Nobody warned me that the most brutal ambushes would come in the most mundane places, without announcement, without mercy, and without any regard whatsoever for the other shoppers who just wanted to pick up a loaf of bread.

This article is about that. About what grief does not just to your heart, but to your world. About the way it quietly, systematically, and with devastating efficiency shrinks the space in which you exist.

What Social Mobility Actually Means

When we talk about social mobility, we almost always mean one thing: the capacity to move upward. To go from where you started to somewhere better. It is framed as an achievement, a ladder, a measure of progress. Governments have strategies for it. Charities are built around it. It is, in the public imagination, almost exclusively a story of improvement.

Nobody talks about it going the other way.

Nobody tells you that life can hand you an event — a single evening, a bedroom floor, a phone call to the paramedics — that sends your social mobility to a place it was never designed to handle. That the competent, connected, functional person you were on 3 August 25 can find themselves, by 5 August, unable to perform tasks that a reasonably organised teenager could manage without thinking.

I am not talking about grief in the abstract. I am talking about specific, concrete losses of capability. The things I used to do without a second thought that I now cannot do or can only do with a preparatory effort that would exhaust most people before they even reached the door.

The supermarket. The pub. A restaurant full of couples on a Saturday evening. The work Christmas party. The school run equivalent — in my case, driving past places Lynn and I used to go together, and having to make a snap decision about whether today is a day I can handle that particular road or whether I need to go the long way round and add twenty minutes to the journey rather than spend one of them falling apart at a roundabout.

This is what I mean by social mobility. Not career. Not class. The simple, basic, taken-for-granted ability to move through the world as a full human being — and what happens when grief takes that away.

The Ambush

The cruellest thing about this particular loss is that it doesn't announce itself.

In the early days — the days immediately after Lynn died, the week of the funeral, the family arriving and the administration of death, which is relentless and bureaucratic in a way that feels almost deliberately cruel — in those days, everyone around you knows. The world makes allowances. People hold doors open for you, metaphorically and sometimes literally. You are visibly broken and the people around you respond to that visibility.
But grief doesn't stay visible. The bruise goes under the skin. You learn, because you must, to perform a version of functionality that gets you through a working day, through a conversation with a colleague, through a college pickup or a team meeting. And the world, which has its own business to attend to, takes that performance at face value and concludes that you are getting better.

What it cannot see is what is happening in Waitrose.

The first time it happened, it was the cereal aisle. Lynn used to do the shopping. Not because I was incapable — I am a reasonably functional adult who can locate a tin of beans — but because she enjoyed it, had a system, knew what everyone liked, and did it with an efficiency that I watched and never adequately appreciated. And of course, she would be safe in the knowledge I had not hijacked the shopping list with a load of stuff we didn’t really need! However, standing in that aisle, with my phone showing me a list I had written myself, surrounded by other people and their trolleys and their ordinary Saturday morning competence, I was hit by something I can only describe as a wave. Not sadness exactly. More like the sudden, physical awareness of an absence so large it had its own gravitational pull.

I left the trolley in the aisle. I walked back to the car. I sat there for twenty minutes before I trusted myself to drive.

I have not gone back to Waitrose alone since.

The Pub Problem

Here is another one, and this one I am less comfortable admitting, because it touches on something about identity and pride that military people in particular will recognise.

I cannot go into a pub alone, even when I know there are friends inside.

This is not a fear of drinking — though I have my own history with that in the months after Lynn died, which I have written about elsewhere, and which I am not going to minimise here. This is something different. It is the awareness, as I stand outside a door I have walked through a hundred times before, that on the other side of it is a room full of people in groups. Couples. Friends. People with a person beside them. And I will have to walk through that door as a singular, and cross the room, and navigate the gap between who I appear to be and what I actually feel, and do all of that alone before I reach the safety of someone I know.

For most people, that is nothing. For the person I was only one year ago, that was nothing. For the person I am now, it seems insurmountable.
I have stood outside pubs and turned around and gone home. I have sent apologetic texts blaming traffic or tiredness. I have sat in car parks and given myself talks that would be embarrassing to transcribe, and sometimes those talks have worked and sometimes they haven't, and the ratio between the two has been the most honest measure I have of how I am doing on any given day.

The Queen Mary 2

In the spring of 2026, I took my daughter Ella to New York. We had a magnificent time — the city was everything it should be, loud and extraordinary and alive in a way that was, for both of us, genuinely restorative. And we sailed home on the Queen Mary 2, with friends. It was their idea, a beautiful one, and one that actually ticked off a bucket list item.

My daughter Ella and I share something that nobody else in my life shares. She was there on the fourth of August. She was in that house. She saw what I saw. She has carried what I have carried, and she has carried it with a courage and a grace that humbles me every time I look at her. We have grieved together and separately and sometimes simultaneously, and there is a closeness in that which I would not trade for anything, even knowing what it cost us both to get there.

But on the Queen Mary 2, in the dining room on the first evening, something happened that I had not braced for.

The Britannia Dining Room was full of couples. Older couples, mostly. People who had saved for this, who were celebrating something — an anniversary, a retirement, a life built together. People sitting across tables from the person they came with, talking and laughing and being entirely, innocently, heartbreakingly normal.

And I sat across from Ella — my daughter, my girl, the dirl I love most in the world after her mother — and I looked at that room, and I felt Lynn's absence like a immense physical pressure. Not her absence from me, in that moment. Her absence from the version of this that should have existed. Because Lynn and I used to talk about doing something like this. It was in the plans. The plans we had for the next twenty years, that we talked about just the weekend before she died.

Ella saw it in my face. She always does. She reached across the table and she held my hand, and neither of us said anything, because there was nothing that needed saying. We both knew. We have always both known.

I tell you this not for sympathy, but because I want you to understand what this kind of social withdrawal actually looks like in practice. It is not always about being alone. Sometimes it is about being in a room full of people, with your daughter's hand in yours, and still feeling the shape of the person who is missing as clearly as if she were standing right there.

That is the ambush. That is what nobody warns you about.

What The People Around You Can Do

I have thought about this carefully, because I want to be fair. The people in my life — my colleagues, my friends, my chain of command (who I must add have been so supportive, life savingly supportive) — largely did not know what was happening, because I was not showing them. That is not their failure. That is the nature of this thing.

But there are signs, if you know to look for them. And I want to name them here, because if someone you work with, or manage, or call a friend has lost someone — particularly a spouse, a partner, the person who was the other half of their daily life — the chances are that some version of what I have described is happening to them, quietly, behind whatever face they are presenting to the world.

They are cancelling things. Not dramatically — not in a way that raises flags. Small cancellations. The after-work drink they used to always come to. The team lunch. The informal gathering that requires them to show up somewhere and be a person in a room. Watch for the pattern, not the individual instance.

They are arriving and leaving differently. Getting to things just as they start, leaving just as they end. Avoiding the unstructured edges of social events where they would have to stand in a group and make conversation without a fixed role to play. Before Lynn died, I could walk into a room and work it without thinking. For a long time afterwards, I could only function if I had a defined purpose for being there.

They are managing the geography of their life around the pain. Taking different routes. Avoiding certain places. Seeming, for no obvious reason, reluctant to go to perfectly ordinary locations. I would drive past the pub where Lynn and I used to go on a Friday and add fifteen minutes to my journey rather than trigger the memory that junction carried. Nobody noticed, because why would they?

They are fine, until suddenly they are not. High-functioning grief does not present as constant distress. It presents as normal — until it doesn't, and then it presents as a disproportionate response to something that seems minor. A colleague in tears at their desk over a form they can't complete. A manager who holds it together through the meeting and then disappears for forty minutes afterwards. Don't pathologize the disproportionate response. Look for what was underneath it.

What You Can Actually Do To Help

Not all of this requires a formal conversation, or a referral to occupational health, or a strategy. Some of it is simpler than that.

If you know your colleague or friend is struggling with entering social spaces, offer to meet them outside. Walk in together. This sounds almost embarrassingly small, but it can be the difference between someone making it through the door and driving home.

Don't stop inviting them. This is one I cannot stress enough. When someone declines repeatedly, the natural human response is to eventually stop asking, out of kindness or awkwardness or the assumption that they prefer to be left alone. They almost certainly do not prefer to be left alone. They are declining because it is hard, not because they don't want to be included. The invitation itself matters, even when — especially when — it is declined.

Offer a specific, structured thing rather than an open offer. "Come if you feel up to it" is well-meaning and almost useless. "I'm going to be at the coffee machine at half ten if you want five minutes" is something a person in withdrawal can actually navigate. Specificity removes the social calculation. It removes the decision-making burden that, for someone in the depths of this, can be completely overwhelming.

Talk to them about the person they lost. I cannot tell you how much it means when someone says Lynn's name. When they mention a memory of her, or ask how the children are doing, or reference something that happened before. If that is tricky, say simply, “I do not know what to say”. The instinct of most people is to avoid the subject in case it causes pain. The truth is that silence causes its own kind of pain — the fear that the person who mattered most is already being forgotten.

And if you are managing someone, or responsible for their welfare: ask directly. Not "how are you doing" — that question has been so thoroughly co-opted by social convention that it now means nothing. Ask "how are you actually doing." Ask "is there anything that's become difficult that I can make easier." Ask "do you want to talk about it, or would it help more if I just made sure you had everything you need and no surprises for a while." Give them a real choice and then respect whichever one they make.

The Slow Return

I want to end with something honest about where I am now, because I don't want this article to be only a description of a problem without any evidence that the problem has a trajectory.

I still cannot do Waitrose alone on a bad day. I suspect that will be true for a long time yet. But I can do it on a good day. That is progress, even if it sounds like a very small thing.

I went to a pub last month. I walked through the door on my own, crossed the room, found my friends, and sat down. My heart was going at a rate that would have concerned a cardiologist, and I spent about ninety seconds in the car park beforehand talking myself into it. But I went in. And it was fine. And the next time will be slightly less terrifying than that, hopefully, and the time after that slightly less again.

Ella and I still talk about the dining room on the Queen Mary 2. We talk about it the way we talk about a lot of things from that trip — with love, and with grief, and with the particular tenderness that comes from sharing something that hurt and being glad, in spite of the hurt, that you were not alone in it.
I have not adjusted to losing Lynn. I have acclimatised. I am learning to live in a new climate, to find what grows here, to discover that the world can still be navigated even when it has been rearranged around an absence. The Waitrose problem is a symptom of a loss, not a verdict on a life.

But I needed help to understand that. Professional help — my therapist, my doctor, the welfare team who showed up and refused to take my composure at face value. My friends and colleagues, especially my DO, who refuses to let me be. My family. And I needed the people around me to remain consistent, to quietly kept showing up, kept extending the invitation, kept saying Lynn's name as if she still mattered. She still matters. She always will.

If you are reading this and you recognise yourself in it — in the car park, outside the pub, taking the long way round — please know that you are not losing your mind. You are losing your footing in a world that has been fundamentally rearranged, and that is a different thing entirely. And please know that there are people, both professional and otherwise, who can help you find it again.

You do not have to earn that help. You do not have to be broken enough to deserve it. You just have to ask.