Severance: Choosing the Other

An essay on Apple TV's Severance, grief and losing control.

When my mum died almost two years ago, I found myself suddenly adrift with no sense of direction. For the past few years, she had been the compass guiding me after I made an abrupt decision to upend my life by quitting my job at the BBC as a media support worker and giving up my tenancy in my Lewisham houseshare. I was 23, living what I thought was the perfect introduction to my working career. When I was younger, I often envisioned myself in my twenties with a hazy mirage of contentment. I would be like the rom-com heroines I had so idealised for so long—think of Andi Anderson, but brunette, without as much charm and much more blunt.

There I was, hoping that, in some way, my coffee and tea skills would transfer into a foot-in-the-door writing job on a BBC show. Or that maybe I’d weasel my way into becoming a researcher on a radio show. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise when taking my job that there was little to no career progression when the basis of my job was servitude. And more importantly, nobody takes you seriously when you don’t want to live and die by your 9-5. For almost a year, I clocked off at 5 PM on the dot, didn’t answer messages out of work, and wouldn’t push myself beyond my contract and capabilities like many of my generation's post-pandemic employees. Work was just work; I had a life beyond that, and in no way should I have sacrificed my personhood for something so temporary. This attitude, whilst normalised today in 2025, was less acceptable in 2022, merely a year after lockdown regulations began lifting. To some extent, perhaps I was already burnt out due to COVID-19 and my final year of university, but on the other hand, was I not allowed to view my work in a more casual manner than life or death, especially since I had been so close to death with my mother’s cancer diagnosis in 2020. I’m not sure what exactly came first, the chicken (quitting my job) or the egg (leaving my houseshare), but out of the blue, I began texting my friends to let them know that I had chosen to move back to Aylesbury without a plan to guide me and no paycheck in sight beyond £200 freelancing fees that were few and far between.

In Severance (2022-), work is the lifeblood of Lumon, especially for the innies (inner versions of our characters). They have no lives of their own, holding on to mere morsels of information handed down to them by wellness practitioners that tell them with idyllic rainforest sounds how good a person their outie (outer versions of our characters) is. Work is presented as more than something to sustain your bank account, bills, life plan or any other signifier of what makes a life worth living (according to the capital C Capitalists). The offices are decked in what my Pinterest board would call retro-modern-futuristic furniture, blending aesthetic imagery of the 1970s with the sleek futuristic build of the Lumon offices. There is no break from work at Lumon, which is the point of the show and the procedure itself. Severance (in my own words) is splitting oneself into a work version and a personal version, aka your innie and outie. Your outie goes to work and leaves work with no recollection of the tasks performed that day. Your innie, however, is the labourer. They take on the burden of severance because they know no other life than working once they've been created. They hold no memories of the outside, no interests of their own, no loves, no family, no unique ticks or annoying quirks they can link to childhood. To many, the innie would be seen as a non-person, only so far attached to the outie and rendered disposable whenever someone quits or is fired. When Helly R (Britt Lower) threatens to cut her fingers off to force the resignation of her outie in season 1, she receives a videotape where her outie, in so few words, tells her she isn’t a person. The outie is. But everything we see in Severance goes against that argument. Sure, they may not remember when you were bullied in grade school, but they hold the trauma in their bodies. They may not remember when they fell through a glass window as a kid, but they have stitches across their thigh (that one happened to me). Some parts of you shine through even without the innie having the exact words or recollection for it. In Severance they aren’t a non-person—they’re you. By denying them personhood, are you not denying your very existence?

My mum died when I was 24. She was admitted to our local hospital after being sick for a few weeks and then died within a month. I’m sorry if that language sounds detached. There’s no other way for me to make it easier to swallow. For the first few weeks of no longer having a mother, I was given time off at the insistence of my boss. It had only been a few months since I was hired part-time, and to have someone give me so much leeway with my bereavement felt strange. I was under the knowledge that most workplaces weren’t so lenient regarding loss. I eventually came back because if there’s something you can take from this essay, let it be that being bereaved is suffocating in ways you wouldn’t expect. Everyone is helping, cooking, mending, cleaning, fixing, and there’s nothing to do. It’s boring, quite honestly. I felt my brain rotting away as all I could do was watch Grey's Anatomy to contend with the lifelong amount of hospital trauma I was left with. Going back to work helped me in ways I hadn’t expected and certainly kept me distracted from the crying. Now you’re thinking, okay, your mum died. That’s sad, and I'm sorry for your loss, but if you enjoyed your work, what does this do with Severance? Well, see, the thing is that my day job, whilst fulfilling and distracting, became an easy way to ignore the actual work I wanted to do—my writing. I’ve written about writer's block before. I penned an essay a couple of months before my mum died about my issue with writing and how it relates to my chronic illness. At the time, I thought that I’d got past it. I could get back to work by mining my personal life for writing material, and I’d be on the fast track to be signed by an agent with a book deal by 25.

Except that when your mum dies, writing becomes the last thing on your mind until it's the only thing on your mind. Admitting this feels gross, but in the name of analysis, I’m going to be honest in a way I haven’t been before. I was jealous. Not the usual “Oh, she’s so gorgeous, why aren’t I?” or “Ugh, I wish I was that financially stable”. No, I was jealous of my peers and their ability to write through trauma. They figured it out somehow, turning their losses into stories that won the hearts of their subscribers over. Not just jealous but disappointed in myself for my lack. Why couldn’t I write an essay about my mum that garnered thousands of likes on Substack? I was good at my job. I wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but I certainly wasn’t too stupid to find it difficult. What the fuck was wrong with me? That was the growing voice of jealousy intermingled with grief in my brain. Every time I came across a book, a poem, an essay fuck even a good Twitter post about how well someone was dealing with or able to talk about their grief, I became irate. What the fuck was wrong with me? Did I not love my mum enough? Was this not traumatic enough? Maybe I was a hack, and I’d been lied to for years about my writing ability. If I couldn’t turn this into something worthwhile what was the point? And yes, this sounds insane because grief makes you insane. Looking back almost two years later, it’s evident that I was in grief-stricken hysteria because, guess what—grief makes you balls-to-the-wall bonkers crazy.

You begin feeling like you’re no longer in control of your body; the days blend into one, and you forget that you were once capable of experiencing joy. I understand why Mark Scout (Adam Scott) chose severance. If his body, like my body, was no longer under our control, or if our brain was under attack by the slightest recollection of perfumes, the types of cakes my mum enjoyed, or photos of Gemma, then why not lob it off? It couldn’t be any less insane than how I’m feeling. He chose severance for the same reason Cobel (Patricia Arquette) created severance after her mother died. Because the loss is uncomfortable at times and frankly unbearable at others. It’s nauseating having so much love for someone you will never be able to see again. You’ll never be able to hear them laugh, get angry with you, or even shout at you. Do you know what I’d do to have my mum yell at me for something silly like leaving my keys in the door or forgetting to take the bins out? At least then, I could apologise and hug her one last time without the blaring beeps of an ICU machine monitoring her oxygen levels.

For the first 10 months after my mum’s passing, I found myself living in a state of psychic limbo. I recall some moments and can't remember others for the life of me. I was severed in my own way, living life as if I no longer was a whole person. And for a while, it worked. I dissociated. I ignored my writing because the writer's block made me feel inadequate and reminded me so much of her support for my career. Instead, I worked from home, went to the cinema, and became a disjointed voice that my friends only heard via Facetime calls because I refused to leave my hometown more than once a month or so. I became my own innie, stuck in a routine of refusal and avoidance that denied me the courage to face the music. Let me tell you, it’s probably the most gruelling and dehumanising experience I’ve gone through in my life. And in my case, there was no magic procedure to put me back together again, no big bad outie holding me hostage or company to riot against. I was experiencing what grief does to us all—unleashing its wrath until we are nothing but shells of our former selves.

When Mark S and Mark Scout have their argument in the season 2 finale about saving Gemma (Dichen Lachman) from her doomed fate, there’s a sense that both parts of him are aware of how much pain the other is inflicting. To save Gemma, Mark S would have to give up the only love of his life he’s experienced by leaving Lumon. If Mark S stays behind with Helly R, Mark Scout loses the love of his life for the second time. Neither is a choice worth stomaching, yet forgetting that someone is gone is more devastating than losing them in the first place. At the end of the episode, Mark S stops in the exit hallway after pushing Gemma out. He looks at her—the woman he’s supposedly meant to love and for whom he was imprisoned—and feels nothing. He looks back and sees Helly R—the sustenance of his time at Lumon over the past two seasons—and, at that moment, feels the full weight of his grief. Not the grief of losing Gemma but the grief of potentially losing Helly. On both sides, there is a tremendous loss at play, but only one is pleasant to the touch. In that moment, staying within that grief, not moving through or past it, brings Mark S to his personhood—something he had long been searching for.

On the 11th month, I moved back to London. It was a choice not made easily as it meant abandoning the last place my mother lived with me and my brothers, but a necessary one nonetheless. I’m unsure if it was London, my friends, or my family, but it was as if a light had switched on. I woke up with a chest that weighed less heavy than it had the week before. I was still crying, bursting at the seams anytime I remembered that I was experiencing such a vital change without her, but the cries became less about my pain and more about her absence. I wandered the streets of North London, envisioning what she’d think of our new home, her closeness to her brother and the flourishing of her children's careers. I avoided thinking about my mum, talking about her, and writing about her because to live within the grief meant feeling it all, but what I hadn’t realised is that within that grief is also love. The love I hold for her that makes me a person. It makes me a great friend, a loving family member, and a daughter who wishes the world knew how incredible her mother once was. Like Mark S, I chose not to go through the grief or past it. I’m living in it every day, and it hurts, and maybe there’s a version of me that is so much happier because I’ve abandoned my hurt, but I quite like how I am right now.

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Just some info: It’s almost 1 AM where I am, so I'm sorry for any mistakes. This was hastily written after seeing the episode this morning. I will be editing it over the next day or so. xx