Unemployed, Not Unlucky

Perspective doesn’t wait for a good time to show up. It shows up in the middle of your worst week, uninvited, holding up a mirror you didn’t ask to look into.

Mine showed up while a friend and the people she loves most were all in surgery on the same night after a life changing event. And I was refreshing my LinkedIn notifications.

None of us asked for the year we got.

The Day Everything Got Stripped Down

On April 16th, I lost my job. Ten years of building a career in communications, knowledge base management, and technical writing, gone in the time it takes to read a subject line. No warning shot. No slow fade. Just a before and an after, and I was standing in the after with no map.

If you’ve been through a layoff, you know the identity crisis that comes with it isn’t dramatic, it’s quiet. You wake up the next morning and you’re not “the person who runs the knowledge base” anymore. You’re just a person, staring at a job market that feels like it’s actively rooting against you, wondering what happens to the version of yourself you spent a decade building.

It is hard. I’m not here to tell you it isn’t. We can’t live off one income indefinitely, and time is not exactly on my side. But somewhere in the middle of the panic, life kept tapping me on the shoulder with reminders that hard is relative.

Then Today Happened

I’m writing this on Monday, July 6th, almost three months into my own unemployment, the same day Microsoft announced it’s cutting 4,800 jobs, about 2 percent of its entire global workforce. Xbox is getting hit the hardest, with 1,600 roles gone today and another 1,600 planned through next fiscal year, on top of four studios being spun off entirely. Commercial sales and consulting are taking a hit too. It’s part of a wave that’s already put well over 100,000 tech workers out of a job this year alone.

So today, thousands of people are waking up in the after that I woke up in back in April. And I keep thinking about them.

To everyone joining this club today: I’m sorry. I really am. I wish this club didn’t have new members every single week. But if you have to be in a club you didn’t ask to join, I promise you this one is kinder than most. We don’t do toxic positivity here. We don’t tell you to hustle harder or that everything happens for a reason. We just tell you the truth and sit with you in it.

Some Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me

It’s going to suck. I’m not going to pretty that up for you. This market is genuinely brutal right now, and it is not your fault. It feels like there are more people than there are jobs, because there are. It feels like we’re owed something more than what we’re getting, some kind of real support, maybe even a stimulus, because when this many people lose their income at once it stops being an individual problem and starts being an economic one. You are allowed to be angry about that. I am angry about that.

I’m not going to tell you to meditate or meal prep or go for a run. Maybe that stuff helps you, and if it does, great. But mostly what I’ll tell you is this. Feel all the feels for as long as you need to. Cry in your car. Rage at the automated rejection email that comes in at 9pm. Stay in bed on the hard days. There is no right or wrong way to move through this, the same way there’s no right or wrong way to move through grief, because that is exactly what this is.

You are mourning an identity. A sense of security. A social connection you didn’t realize was built entirely around a job title. A purpose you clocked into every morning without thinking twice about it. It’s deep. It really is. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, tell you it’s not.

The Reminders Kept Coming

A friend and the people she loves most were all in surgery on the same night after a life changing event. Perspective.

A mother I heard on a podcast is still living through the loss of her four year old son, just a year after a preventable accident happened in her husband’s care, while news helicopters circled overhead and strangers online decided they had the right to judge her grief. Perspective.

My grandmother broke her hip. Emergency surgery, on top of health complications she was already fighting, and now she has to force herself up and moving before her body has even caught its breath. Perspective.

Zoom out even further and it keeps going. Back to back earthquakes ripped through Venezuela last month, toppling more than a hundred buildings and damaging tens of thousands more, in a country already buckling under crisis after crisis. Families are still digging through rubble, some of them still searching for people. Perspective.

Health workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have spent months in full protective gear, moving through isolation wards during an Ebola outbreak serious enough that the World Health Organization declared it a public health emergency. People are losing loved ones to something most of us will never have to think twice about. Perspective.

None of that erases what any of us are going through. My situation is still hard. Yours is too. But somewhere between hospital visits and headlines, I had to admit something uncomfortable to myself. I would rather be exactly where I am, unemployed and unsure, than trade places with any of them. Selfishly, honestly, without hesitation.

It’s hard to see that clearly when you’re in the trenches. When you’re the one applying to job number forty seven and getting the automated rejection at 9pm. But hard isn’t a competition, and perspective isn’t about minimizing your own pain. It’s about remembering you still have doors left to walk through, and that you still have your health, your people, and your whole self intact, even when your job title isn’t.

What I’m Actually Doing With That Perspective

Here’s where the millennial in me refuses to just sit in the feels and call it a day. Perspective without action is just a nice Instagram caption. So instead of spiraling every time a rejection email hits my inbox, I’ve been trying to treat this stretch like what it actually is: a forced audit of everything I’m good at.

Ten years in communications taught me how to translate chaos into something people can actually understand. Knowledge base management taught me how to take a mess of scattered information and organize it into something a whole team can rely on. Technical writing taught me how to sit with complexity until it makes sense, and then explain it so simply that nobody realizes how hard that was.

Turns out those are the exact same skills I’m using right now, just pointed at my own life instead of a company’s help center. I’m organizing my own scattered mess. I’m translating a layoff into a next chapter instead of a full stop. I’m technical writing my way through my own uncertainty, one draft at a time.

One Door Closes

I don’t have a tidy ending for this, because I’m still living it. Three months in, I still don’t know when the next door opens or what’s behind it. And now there are thousands of new people staring at the same closed door I’ve been staring at since April. What I do know is that closed doors aren’t verdicts, they’re just closed doors. Somewhere out there is a team that needs someone who can turn confusion into clarity, who has spent a decade doing exactly that, and who now has firsthand, gut level proof of what it means to adapt when the ground shifts without permission.

I haven’t been handed that door yet. But I’ve got my hand ready, and I’m not about to stop knocking.

To everyone new here, welcome. Feel it all. Then keep knocking with me.