OverFlow: Getting Laid Off and Finding My Village
I needed to let go of what no longer serves me to make room for new things in my life.
OverFlow is what happens when I overthink, overflow, and over-everything. When my feelings have nowhere to go, I write about them.
I know I just published a Substack post about surviving a mass layoff situation at work, but I wrote that in July, and scheduled it way after it happened.
A few weeks ago, there was another round of layoffs—and I didn’t survive that one. So here I am, processing how this affects my life.
Being Not Even Important Enough to Show Up For
I got laid off in the middle of the morning, in the middle of the work week, in the middle of a pay period. I got an invite to a meeting with a higher-up who’d never spoken to me before. Someone else set up the meeting for him. I joined the Zoom call on time, and then met two other higher-ups who said the original person I had the meeting with couldn’t make the call. In that same sentence, they told me that I was going to be laid off.
I think my brain froze to keep me sane enough for the rest of the call. I became the smallest little mouse again and just absorbed the information being shared with me. They left the call, and I stared at myself on the screen for a few minutes. My brain was catching up to real life and processing the fact that I didn’t have a job anymore.
Eventually, I got up and told my husband the news.
Experiencing Not an Unfamiliar Feeling
It turned out that most of my team was getting laid off, on a day when our manager wasn’t there. We kept in touch online as each one of us was pulled into a meeting and got told the same thing. Honestly, it was triggering trauma I’d sustained at what I (still) call my dream job—being the editor-in-chief of AmplifyPH. While this exact thing didn’t happen at AmplifyPH, there were enough similarities that triggered extremely hurtful feelings.
But throughout the entire day and even after, my team kept in touch, and we made space for each other as we felt our feelings. As with AmplifyPH, I really am mourning the loss of this friend group more than the loss of my job. Of course, we’ll all always be friends—but it’s different when you don’t interact with each other every day, don’t work toward the same goals, and aren’t in each other’s lives. I’ve seen it and felt it before. I’ll always think of the AmplifyPH team as family, but I don’t know the specifics of their lives anymore.
What made things worse for me was that I didn’t build a friend group here in the U.S. after we moved. My main friend group here really is that content team. That’s what my former employer took from me. That’s how this situation has affected my life.
Being My Ride or Die
My husband sprang into action immediately when I told him the news. We needed to use what we left on my FSA card before the day ended, or else the money in it would be wasted. That was one of the first things the two higher-ups told me that I held onto for the rest of the call, balancing on it so as not to rock the boat of my sanity. So my husband took the day off and got a dental procedure done, so we could charge it to that card. After that, he took me to get Korean BBQ! To this day, he’s been as gentle and careful with me as he can be.
I think maybe he’s a little worried because I haven’t cried yet. But it’s not sadness that’s at the forefront of my emotions. It’s the curious combination of relief and rage. Relief, because I wasn’t happy with my job anymore, but I would have never left on my own. It’s also rage, because I’d been putting up with things I don’t agree with for months on top of taking in more and more work and sticking to deadlines. While I’m relieved I don’t have that job anymore, I don’t think losing it was a fair response to the amount of effort and energy I put into it. But life isn’t fair, and the sooner I accept that, the sooner I’ll let go of what no longer serves me. Not everyone can be my ride or die, like my husband is.
Finding My Village Despite Not Building a Path
From the moment this happened, I had a village to help me get through it. My team stuck together through it all, as I’d already mentioned. But I also posted a story on IG saying I’d been laid off, and didn’t expect the responses from that at all.
Some people messaged me to talk about it because they’d also been recently laid off or are also on the job hunt—a few of them I hadn’t talked to in years! Others were very concerned, asking if I was okay or needed help. Some just started a conversation that had nothing to do with the job loss.
I think maybe sharing that I’d lost my job was seen as me being very vulnerable. And if you’re my friend, you know I have trouble with that. I don’t share things like a normal person does. That’s why I’m on Substack—I find it easier to process what happens to me through writing, no matter who reads it. But carrying on multiple conversations with people who reached out because they obviously cared about me did something to my heart—and my brain.
Deserving Love No Matter What
First of all, the hardest part of not having a job is not having access to easy productivity hits. Let me explain. I have an unhealthy dependence on dopamine—I’m assuming?—from being productive. I get a hit every time I tick off an item on a to-do list. A lot of this comes from the idea that I have to be “worth” attention, care, or love. The idea of deserving all of that just as you are is prevalent in what I read or otherwise consume, but I still have a hard time believing that about me. So, I think my brain rewards my body for being productive because it’s a survival tactic. As long as I’m being productive, I’m being useful; as long as I’m being useful, I’m worth something.
So that fact that a whole village came out to carry the weight of what happened to me is pretty huge. From the people who were going through the same thing to the staff and dentist who scheduled and did the dental procedure on my husband—feels great to know that I have a community that supports me no matter what.
Healing and Manifesting
As of the time of this writing, and probably even up until the time this is published, I’m jobless and still reeling from the unexpected change. But I think my emotions are moving from the twin Rs—relief and rage—to gratefulness.
I needed that kick out the door to see that my ideal life shouldn’t include a job I feel uncomfortable in. I needed to accept that the world isn’t fair and that I shouldn’t expect to always get what I deserve. I needed to see that people would show up to support me without being asked. I needed to let go of what no longer serves me to make room for new things in my life.
Photo by Helen Cramer on Unsplash
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