The Part of a Layoff Nobody Prepares You For

I was employee number 247 at a company that prided itself on being a family. They used that word often in all-hands meetings, in the Slack channel called #culture, in the onboarding deck that welcomed me with a photograph of the founders smiling in a way that suggested they had never once considered the possibility of letting anyone go. Family. I believed it the way you believe weather forecasts, with enough faith to plan around it but not enough to be truly surprised when it turns out to be wrong.

The meeting was fifteen minutes. My manager, a woman I had reported to for two years, a woman whose birthday I had contributed to a cake for three months earlier, sat across a table with an HR representative I had never seen before and read from a script. I know it was a script because she paused in places where a person having a real conversation would not pause, and because the phrases she used, "business restructuring," "difficult decision," "nothing to do with your performance," had the polished, frictionless quality of language that has been approved by a legal team. I sat there and nodded. I am not sure why I nodded. Agreement seemed beside the point. But the body does strange things when the mind has stalled, and mine chose nodding, a steady, rhythmic, almost bovine nodding that continued until she slid a piece of paper across the table and asked me to sign.

They let me keep my laptop bag. That is the detail I remember most clearly, and I recognise the absurdity of it, that in the catalogue of things lost that morning, the bag is what my memory has chosen to preserve. It was a grey bag with the company logo embroidered on the front pocket, and as I walked out of the building carrying it, the logo facing outward like a name tag for a club that had just revoked my membership, I thought: this is what severance looks like. Not the cheque, which would arrive in four to six weeks. The bag. The logo you carry home.

Nobody prepares you for the administrative loneliness that follows. The first week is shock, a kind of anaesthetic that makes the days feel padded, soft, slightly unreal. The second week the anaesthetic wears off and the days sharpen. You wake up at 7am because your body has not yet received the memo, and you lie in bed with nothing to get up for, and the ceiling has a crack you have never noticed because you were always in a hurry, and now you are not in a hurry, and the crack looks like a river on a map, and you follow it with your eyes because following a crack on the ceiling is what your morning has become.

I updated my LinkedIn profile on day three. "Open to opportunities." The phrase has a buoyancy to it, a suggestion of agency, as though I had chosen to open a door rather than been pushed through one. People I had not spoken to in years sent messages. "Exciting times ahead!" one wrote, with an exclamation mark that felt like a small act of violence. Another sent a link to a job posting with the note "thought of you," and I clicked it and the posting required seven years of experience in a technology I had six years of experience in and I closed the tab and sat there and the sitting was very loud.

The loneliness of unemployment is not the same as the loneliness of solitude. It is structural. It is the sudden absence of a framework that gave shape to your days, identity to your introduction, and people to your lunch hour. I had not realised how much of my social life was scaffolded by the office until the office was removed and the scaffolding collapsed and I was left standing in an open space with no reason to be anywhere at any particular time. My friends were at work. My wife was at work. The neighbourhood during weekday hours belonged to retired uncles and domestic workers, and I belonged to neither category, and the category I did belong to, laid off, recently, still processing, was not one that came with a community or a daily routine or a place to sit that was not my own sofa.

I did not tell my parents for three weeks. My father worked at the same company for thirty-one years. Explaining to him that a company can let you go not because you did anything wrong but because a spreadsheet somewhere determined that your role was no longer cost-effective would require a translation between generations that I did not have the energy for. So I performed employment. I woke up, showered, sat at my desk, opened my laptop, and applied for jobs with the same disciplined misery with which I had once attended Monday morning standups. The performance was for my own benefit as much as anyone else's. Without it, the days had no skeleton. They sprawled.

What I want to say, the thing that the LinkedIn posts and the severance meetings and the motivational articles about "bouncing back" never quite capture, is that a layoff is a bereavement. Not for a person, but for a version of yourself. The version that had a badge and a desk and a Slack avatar with a green dot that meant present, available, part of something. That version is gone. And the grief is real, even if nobody sends flowers.