December 2025, a week before Christmas, I was laid off. From a company I helped grow for 10 years.

I remember sitting there, processing what was happening, and thinking… ten years. Ten years of showing up. Ten years of adapting, of learning new things I didn’t sign up for, of caring more than I probably should have. And it ended on a Friday, a week before Christmas, on ugly sweater day, in a one on one meeting I didn’t schedule.

I mostly just remember the shock washing over me, almost muting my other senses. And the resounding feeling of… fuck.

I kind of knew something was coming. My former manager had reached out the day before, asking if I was going to be in the office. That’s not a normal question. You file it away, tell yourself you’re probably overthinking it, and then you’re not.

The anger came fast. You can’t argue with a layoff. There’s no one to yell at. The decision was made somewhere above you, by people who… well, except in this case, they knew me. This wasn’t a big company. I worked alongside the owners for years. Hell, I lived with two of them for a time. So when they tried to pin it back on me, to frame things I’d done as the reason this was happening, I knew what that was. That was guilt talking. That was someone trying to make a hard thing easier on themselves. It didn’t land the way they probably hoped.

And I think that narrative traveled. Because the silence from former coworkers afterward hurt more than I expected. People I’d worked alongside for years. I don’t blame them entirely, you only know what you’re told. But it stung. It added a layer to the whole thing I wasn’t really prepared for.

I spent a lot of December just… stewing. The holidays were weird. You’re supposed to be present and grateful and all of that. And I was, I really was. But there was this constant low hum underneath everything, like white noise you can’t fully tune out. At least I didn’t have to worry about checking my email this year.

The job search started the way it always does. Updating the resume. Reaching out to people. Targeted LinkedIn searches. Hell, I even dabbled with Premium to see if it would help. Trying to figure out what you even want next when you’ve spent a decade becoming very good at a specific thing inside a specific place. It’s disorienting. More than I expected, honestly. I didn’t realize how much of my identity had gotten tangled up in that job until it was just… gone. Like, who am I at 9am on a Tuesday if I’m not that guy anymore?

There were leads. Some went somewhere, some completely ghosted. And it’s really easy to build up a narrative in your head, to see yourself thriving somewhere new, to start mentally redecorating, and then it just doesn’t progress. No reason. No closure. Just silence. That’s its own gutpunch on top of everything else. But somewhere in that process, I landed where I am now. And I’ll be honest, it wasn’t my resume that got me here. It wasn’t my skills or my achievements. It was a person. A human connection I’d made somewhere along the way who thought of me when it mattered. I know it sounds cliche, but it really isn’t about what you know. It’s about who you know. And more importantly, who knows you.

And slowly, the anger started to… not disappear, but change shape. The volume was finally starting to turn down.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you it was all part of a plan, or that I’m grateful it happened, or that everything works out for a reason. I don’t know that. I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that I’m not seeing red every time I think about it anymore. The burning, festering kind of anger that I was carrying around… that’s mostly gone.

I don’t wish them well yet. I’m not there. But I’m not wishing them harm either. Don Draper said it best. I don’t think about them at all. Well… not constantly, anyway. And that feels like progress.

If you’re in it right now, the fresh part, the raw part, I’m not going to tell you it gets better fast or that you’ll be fine. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t know for a while. But it does shift. Slowly. The fire banked down to embers, and then one day you realize you went a few hours without thinking about it. And then a few more.

That’s where I am. Still working through it. Still figuring out what the next version of things looks like. But the weight got lighter somewhere along the way, and I didn’t notice it happening until it already had.

And now? Same industry, but on the other side of it. I’m in tech, in software, which is something I’d always wanted. It feels exciting and cool but I’m still solving the same kinds of problems I always have, just from a different angle. The types of employers I used to work for? Those are my customers now. Hell, my former employer included. Small world. But more than that, I have work life balance. I’m not stressed all the time. And after getting knocked down the way I did, I’m once again surrounded by people who want to see me win. That has helped get me back up.