Sometimes life doesn’t just hand you lemons. It chucks them at your face with the force of a thousand “we regret to inform you” emails. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “when it rains, it pours.” But if you’ve ever had the joy of getting bulldozed by a tsunami of back-to-back bad news, you know that phrase doesn’t quite cover it. Sometimes, the downpour feels more like a full-blown natural disaster with no evacuation plan.
Let’s get right to it: I was laid off recently.
From a job I held for over three years. A job I was good at. A job I wasn’t planning to leave. And yes, while the official news came suddenly, the truth is I saw the writing on the wall a long time ago. But seeing the signs and acting on them are two different things.
Ignoring the Gut Feeling (a Favorite Pastime of Mine)
A year before the layoff, something started to feel…off. My department took a major hit during the company’s first-ever round of layoffs. Leadership, once refreshingly transparent, began answering every question with a carefully worded non-answer. You could feel it—the weird tension in meetings, the vague promises, the forced optimism. We all knew something was brewing, but no one wanted to be the first one to say it out loud.
I had the nagging feeling that I needed to start looking for a new job. But I didn’t. Because the devil you know, right? Because change is scary. Because the market is brutal. Because I convinced myself I was overreacting, catastrophizing, being too sensitive.
Burnout in Real Time
Eventually, the stress caught up. I was working late into the night and through weekends, waking up nauseated from anxiety. I’d been down that road before, and I knew where it ended: with me curled up on the couch with chronic migraines and a full-blown existential crisis.
So I started job hunting. Quietly. I reached out to people I trusted, brushed off my resume, and told myself I was just seeing what was out there. And then, just one week later, the email landed in my inbox: “Can you meet with us this afternoon?”
And I knew.
The Shock That Wasn’t
In that moment, I was both blindsided and completely unsurprised. Grief and relief. Panic and peace. It was a contradiction sandwich with a side of imposter syndrome.
And yeah, the positivity brigade will say, “This is just making room for something better!” or “You’re being redirected!” Maybe. And yes, I do subscribe to that way of thinking since it helps me pick myself off the floor faster than just wallowing in my misery (which I do reserve time for as well— I’m a libra, I need balance). But in that moment, it just felt like free-falling into the unknown with nothing but a coffee-stained resume and a LinkedIn account that hadn’t been updated since 2022.
So Now What?
Now, I’m navigating life post-layoff with a lot of questions and very few answers. But what I do know is this: I stayed too long because I hoped things would get better. I ignored my gut because I didn’t want to believe it was right. And now, here I am, forced to start over. But maybe this time, I won’t wait until I’m drowning to admit the water’s rising.