For the Ones Who Made Work Their World

Layoffs continue. Three years into the wave that started in tech, they've expanded across sectors. The pattern holds.

Being laid off can be overwhelming. Unsolicited advice abounds. Your suddenly open schedule disorients. The WHYs of it all circle.

A lot has been written about navigating this space. This is a note for the people who were especially attached to their work. The ones who identified with it. Those who found belonging in the workplace, who made work their world. We aren't supposed to do these things and are often shamed when we do — see the whole workplace-as-family conversation. People in this category are often the most impacted by layoffs, and most advice is not written for them.

I was laid off from a job I loved. I wasn't open about the mechanics of it publicly at the time; my husband and I were in an adoption process and feared it would fall through under the circumstances. The short follow-on answer is that in recognizing that fear, we realized the circumstances weren't right for us anyway.

Layoff decisions are impersonal. Their impacts are not. The mechanics alone are worth noting: an early morning email, immediate cutoff from everything you built, everyone you worked alongside. For some people, that is traumatic in a clinical sense. Most complex trauma is relationship-based. If your relationship with your work figures large in your life, that insta-separation can do real damage. Trauma — whether caused by a relationship or an event — is an actual injury to the brain. Give these circumstances the same care you would a broken limb.

Based on that, here are three things I'd do differently:

1. Set clear boundaries early. I did the emotional labor about six months after the fact, when I should have done it in the first week. Tell people you need space for a defined period of time — that you'll be back, but can't be there right now. Turn your notifications off, especially if your job rewarded constant responsiveness. If you trained people to expect your availability, that conditioning will work against your recovery. Interrupt it deliberately.

2. Change your surroundings. Get out of your normal environment, as far as you can manage. A complete change of scenery accelerates the psychological break from the previous chapter. Go somewhere unfamiliar. Be unreachable for a stretch. The distance is the point.

3. Resist pressure to act. Ignore the career support being offered from every direction. The market will be saturated — that's the nature of a layoff cycle. I wouldn't start a serious job search for at least three months if you can hold off. I know that's not always financially feasible, and I'm not dismissing how hard that is. But I bowed to the pressure to move quickly, and it wasn't right for me. You'll make imperfect decisions under imperfect conditions. Make the ones that are most honest about what you actually need.

After a few months, what finally landed for me was the idea that you get what you need, not what you want. It took time to accept that what I needed — after years of high-intensity work — was a genuine break. Not a transition. A stop.

The post-layoff period is a real opportunity to invest in yourself. Counterintuitive, yes. Your capacity to learn and actually absorb that learning is a useful signal that your Window of Tolerance is expanding. Look it up. Understand what the circumstances are asking of you. It might be rest. It might be a career change. It might be going independent. Whatever it is, it's hard. And it's temporary.