I was laid off after eleven and a half years. This is what the first weeks actually looked like, and the journal I wrote to get myself through them.
The day
I found out on my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday.
Eleven and a half years at one organization. I started as an entry-level manager and left as Chief Operating Officer, with a stretch as interim CEO in between. That job was most of my routine, a lot of my confidence, and nearly all of my sense that the ground would still be there tomorrow.
So it wasn’t only the paycheck. It was the structure, the purpose, and the people I saw every day. I support myself and two dogs on one income, and the arithmetic got loud fast.
The part nobody warns you about
At first people reach out. Questions, check-ins, a wave of it in the first week.
Then it goes quiet. The routine I’d had for more than a decade was gone, and what replaced it was a very long day with nothing in it that had a deadline. I job hunted. I worried. I tried hard not to cry into my dogs’ fur.
I wasn’t eating on any schedule. I wasn’t doing a single thing for the pleasure of it. I wasn’t processing what had happened, I was just getting through the hours it took up.
What actually helped
Job loss is a loss
Your brain files it somewhere near grief. Routine, identity and security go in the same hour. Treating it as a scheduling problem is what makes it take longer.
Busywork is not healing
I applied for jobs. I cleaned out closets. I built this website. All of it moved time. None of it moved anything else.
Sitting with it is worse for an hour and better for a month
Embarrassment. Fear. Anger. Relief, which was the one I didn’t want to admit to. Writing them down got them out of my chest and onto a page, where they were a normal size.
Small things count
Long dog walks. Coffee outside. A paint-by-numbers kit I’d ordered months before the layoff, when people kept telling me to get a hobby, and had never opened. The quiet repetitive brushstrokes turned out to be the thing. It cost nothing and it gave my mind somewhere to land on the days when the job search and the money felt too heavy to pick up.
Structure gives you back some ground
Wake up. Get dressed. Write. Move. Eat. It sounds like nothing. In a week with nothing else in it, it’s the only shape the day has.
The First Five Days
Eight pages. Five of them are writing days, ten minutes each, for the week after you lose the job.
Day one names the feeling. Day two takes the sentence you told yourself in the first hour and checks it against the evidence. Day three asks who you are without the title. Day four gives you one small thing to fix in your house, because that is how the days start having a shape again. Day five is a year from now.
There’s no advice in it. Nobody reads it but you. You don’t have to do the days in order and you don’t have to do them on consecutive days.
Two versions, both free, and both in the same email. The print version has a white page so a home printer doesn’t drink a cartridge. The tablet version is blush throughout, for GoodNotes or Notability or anything else you write on with a stylus.
Free workbook
Tell me where to send it.
What I’m doing now
Working out what taking care of yourself actually means on one income, in an uncertain season, while rebuilding an identity that used to come with a title attached.
I’m doing it in a 1959 house that needs a great deal of work, and I’m doing it in public, so you can see what the work actually looks like rather than only the finished rooms.
Who am I without the title. What do I want next. What do I need in order to get there. The journal doesn’t answer any of those. It gives you somewhere to put them.
If the days themselves are the problem, and not just the first week, there’s a longer piece here about what the weeks after actually looked like, and the daily system that came out of them.
This is a journal, not therapy, and I’m not a therapist. If you’re carrying more than you can hold, talk to someone. In the US, call or text 988, any time.