Is crying at work wrong?

If it is, here's the times I haven't been right.

Last week, a friend told me that they always see me as someone who has their life figured out. Someone who’s in control. If you’re a regular reader of this Substack (thank you!), you’re probably aware of how wide of the mark that is. While I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m a total chaotic mess, I think it’s fair to say I have my weaknesses, my vulnerabilities, my insecurities. I like to share them here with you  - particularly in the context of discussing career advice  - because I think it’s healthy to discuss the fact that success walks beside these things. 

So I’ve been thinking the last few days about times that work has reduced me to tears. 

We don’t like crying, do we? It’s something we always feel embarrassed about, even ashamed of, and end up apologising about.  

We also seem sort of afraid of it. But I decided, long ago, that if someone at work is crying when they’re talking to me about something, I’m never going to immediately react with, ‘Oh no! Don’t cry!’ I trained myself to not go straight to panic if someone’s upset. Because it’s usually the beginning of a breakthrough: that point when someone’s stopped pretending that they’re OK about an issue, and now we’re going to have the first real, all defences down conversation about it and solve a problem.  

Somewhere along the way we decided that because you cry when you’re sad, that crying is bad. But if that emotional sledgehammer of a film Inside Out taught me anything, it’s that all of our emotions are real and valid and they all need their moment in the sun.

When I cry, it usually happens at a point where I’ve been denying myself permission to feel something and my body’s had enough of the denial. It’s like the feeling needs to get out and if I’ve sat on it and squashed it and yelled at it to stay in that little box right at the bottom of my heart, eventually it’s going to explode out of me. Out of my eyes. 

I’m not a regular crier. There’s very few times in my long working life when I’ve done it at work. But I thought you might enjoy the tales of when I actually did bawl my eyes out at work. Here goes:

The first cover of Glamour

It’s a long story, you can read it here. When you get to the bit where I’m sitting with Kate Winslet’s agent and publicist and lawyer, know that I still had a face that was ghostly white, save for the massive red splotches all over it caused by snot-crying.  

When my boss said a really nice thing

On the flipside, these were nice tears. I finally had the first issue of Glamour in my hands. The months of trying to pull together the perfect team, the mighty highs and lows of getting celebrities and writers to trust us and be in the first issue, ditto the advertisers, the agonising over every word and picture and typeface on every page. Finally, eight months of blood, sweat and tears had birthed a baby magazine. My boss at the time, Nicholas, thumbing through it for the umpteenth time while we waited for a meeting to start,  looked at me and quietly said, ‘I think this is the best first issue of a magazine I have ever seen.’ Maybe he always says that, I don’t know, but in that moment, it made me well up. I’d launched another magazine a few years earlier, called B, and frankly, everyone lined up to tell me I’d done a terrible job of that (see further down). So this was a full circle emotional moment for me. He didn’t notice, I looked at the desk and just fought it off. But yeah, he made me cry happy tears for a few seconds. 

The Glamour Beauty Festival 

More happy tears. The Glamour Beauty Festival was probably an even bigger nightmare to pull together than the Glamour Awards. Because unlike the Glamour Awards, we were under pressure for it to make money. Ah, the wondrous days of print magazines desperately needing ‘additional revenue streams’ were upon us. And this additional revenue stream was  an expensive, time-consuming thing to put together. We needed to entice people to pay money to come along - never an easy thing. I needed to beg celebrity guests to give up their time for free. It had to hit the sweet spot whereby the price we charged would help us meet costs and make a profit, but not so high that Glamour’s readers said, ‘Er, how much? Fuck off.’ 

It was a risky venture and it took months to organise and so, when I saw the queues forming for the first morning of the beauty festival, and they stretched around the block of people waiting to get in, I really lost it for a moment. It was the combination of all the stress of the months of work rushing out of my eyes (again) and the sight of all those people who were happy to pay money to this untested thing, on the strength of the Glamour brand name. Luckily the place was crawling with make-up and make-up artists and I got that streaked mascara sorted pretty quickly. 

A scene from the 2016 inaugural Glamour Beauty Festival. Rita Ora: ‘Jo, how is this ‘live cover shoot’ thing going to work on stage? What will happen?’ Me: ‘I honestly don’t fucking know, mate, OK?’ And that is what she and I are laughing about in this picture. With Chris Appleton, Damon Baker, Natalie Hartley and Mary Greenwell.

The day we all got binned from Glamour

I didn’t cry at all when I was told I was losing my job. I’d been aware for months that I was out of favour, so I honestly felt more relief to know I hadn’t been going mad and I hadn’t imagined that suddenly I was being frozen out of meetings. I’d also endured things like having people I barely even knew sidle up to me, all faux concern and whispers to say things like, ‘Jo, make sure they give you a good pay-out.’ (‘What do you mean? What do you know?!’ I’d asked while the person would give me a mournful look and silently scurry away again). 

But the next day, when the entire team were to be told their jobs were ‘at risk’, was much tougher. When their fate was read out to them by our boss, from a typed piece of paper and delivered with all the warmth and sympathy of Siri, I looked around and saw so many young, shocked, frightened faces. When it was my turn to say something, I had to do it through racking sobs. I felt so guilty and so responsible for all the panicked faces looking back at me. I mean, I know it wasn’t my fault that the internet changed the entire business model for print media, but in that moment, I just felt so sad that no matter how hard we’d all worked, we’d lost. When the announcement was over and I’d stopped crying/talking, everyone returned to their desks, stunned, and then found that a press release had been issued about the wonderful news of Glamour’s new direction. And we’d all been mass logged out of the company’s servers. I guess they were frightened that someone would say something disparaging over our Twitter account or something, which I found so insulting. Then I received an email telling me my credit card had been frozen that began, ‘Dear employee’. My colleague and friend James came in and hugged me and we both cried.

The time I had a spelling mistake on the cover of You magazine

I still find it difficult to talk about this. It’s not the end of the world, of course, but it's a baseline requirement for an editor to get all the words on a magazine cover right. It’s a publishing cardinal sin and it’s probably the most embarrassed at work I can ever remember being. I checked the cover proof, as did many of my senior team. It’s just one of those bloody annoying things that happens once in a while. We got ‘suprise’ on the cover, instead of ‘surprise’ and ‘SUPRISE!’ it also happened to be the one of the biggest bloody words on that particular cover.

And yes, it happened to be one with my friend, the late Caroline Flack. She thought it was hilarious. My boss did not.

As per, Caroline looked amazing.

I’d only been in the job a few weeks. Someone senior said to me, ‘I feel for you because everyone will be saying, “Oh is this how it’s going to be under the new editor of You?”’. Which didn’t really need pointing out to be honest, I knew everyone would be either appalled at such stupidity or laughing their arses off about it, or both.

It’s such a ‘you cannot be serious’ rookie error that I had to not only provide a written explanation to my boss of how this could have happened, but I also had to offer my resignation. 

When he came to my office to see me and say mistakes happen, we’ll get over it, I cried with relief and shame. Then I said, ‘I’m sorry I don’t know why I’m crying I’m just so angry with myself.’ And he said, ‘You’re crying because you care and that’s what matters.’ And so I cried some more. Jesus.

On the plus side, every mansplainer in Britain was positively erect with the sheer joy of pointing out my mistake. 

And my friends had a gay old time of it with constantly texting me and throwing in a ‘SUPRISE!’ at every opportunity. For weeks. 

Most days whilst launching and editing B magazine

I think this launch cover of B perfectly illlustrates the fact that no one could agree on what this magazine should be.

1996-1998: easily the most toxic, unhappy period of my entire working life. It was a magazine aimed at 19-22 year old women (so not so much a gap in the magazine market, as a crevice) and it was owned jointly by two companies. These two companies each delivered unto me a boss. And those bosses tended to have opposite views on what the magazine should be and it was my job to make them both happy. They both demanded things like, I show them the covers I was producing before the other one. I had to deploy some real Game of Thrones shit to make them both believe they were seeing things first. One of them would say things to me like, ‘I agree with you about what you said in that meeting but I can’t be seen to be arguing with him on that.’ Throw in a very small under-paid, overworked team, a cramped office where I found myself having to beg for things like tampon bins for about 15 women (which never materialised) and it’s a wonder I didn’t end up having a nervous breakdown. But I cried a lot. I even cried the day they finally fired me until my husband - oh actually he was my boyfriend in those days, that sounds sexier - pointed out that this was a result and I should be smiling. 

There’s probably more but these are the core crying memories. Tell me yours.