Some things break your heart but fix your vision.

Unknown

“Effective immediately.”

Shiver.

I remember reading those two words on my termination paperwork and wincing right before I started to cry.

I knew things weren’t going particularly well.

Still, anticipation did very little to soften the blow.

My fight-or-flight instincts kicked in almost immediately, which for me tends to look less like fighting or fleeing and more like panicking, asking an unreasonable number of questions, and eventually having a good old-fashioned ugly cry.

I’m sure none of this was particularly surprising to my manager.

She’d seen me cry before.

By then, we’d made it through both my six- and twelve-month performance reviews, experiences I can now describe with some perspective and at the time would have described as psychological warfare.

That’s dramatic.

But I was dramatic.

More importantly, I was sensitive.

And I had just spent a year working somewhere that had correctly identified that quality in me before they even hired me.

During my interviews, the team had been reasonably confident that I possessed the technical skills to do the job. What they weren’t so sure about was whether I had the grit required to succeed in their particular version of PR.

They weren’t wrong.

I pleaded my case anyway.

Apparently I was persuasive enough to convince them to take a chance on the great-on-paper, decent-in-person, perhaps-a-little-too-mousy candidate sitting across from them.

Yours truly.

On my first day, I walked up to the company’s brand-new glass door, failed to notice the hot pink sticky note that read PUSH in shouty caps, and nearly ripped the thing off its hinges trying to pull it open.

So much for first impressions.

Thankfully, Becca, who was also starting that day, witnessed the entire thing and somehow decided not to disassociate herself from me immediately.

Despite my graceful entrance, I was thrilled to be there.

After jobs that involved processing tax returns and spending what felt like half my life standing at a copy machine, I’d landed at a women-owned and operated PR agency.

The work was interesting.

The women were impressive.

The opportunity felt enormous.

I was also petrified.

My brain has always been remarkably efficient at producing a worst-case scenario whenever I’m about to attempt something I’m not entirely sure I’m capable of doing.

In this case, it wasn’t entirely wrong.

Over time, the hope and enthusiasm I walked in with started to fade. There were circumstances outside of work contributing to that, but there were things happening inside the office, too.

The performance reviews were particularly difficult for me.

Peer feedback was direct. The culture valued candor. Sensitivity wasn’t particularly useful currency.

I had sensitivity in abundance.

Those reviews chewed me up and spat me out six ways to Sunday.

No matter how much positive feedback accompanied the criticism, I would leave defeated. Eventually I’d stop crying. What took longer to recover was my confidence.

For a while, I blamed the process.

Then I blamed myself.

With enough distance, I think both explanations were too simple.

The feedback wasn’t inherently cruel because I struggled to receive it. And my struggle to receive it didn’t make me incompetent.

It just wasn’t a particularly successful combination.

After my six-month review, I felt misunderstood and undervalued. I became quieter. More guarded. I stopped trusting the people evaluating me enough to communicate openly with them.

I can imagine that my distance, in turn, became increasingly difficult for them to understand.

And there we were.

Crossed wires breeding more crossed wires.

By the time I was fired, I wasn’t shocked.

Devastated, yes.

Shocked, no.

Afterward, I frantically scoured my employment agreement and non-compete looking for answers. I learned that while the company wasn’t required to provide its reasoning automatically, I could formally request it.

For a brief period, I considered doing exactly that.

Then I pictured myself sitting somewhere reading a detailed account of every reason they had decided I shouldn’t work there anymore.

Absolutely not.

The performance reviews had already done enough damage.

I opted not to request the receipts.

Instead, I spent an impressive amount of time conducting my own exit interview in my head.

What had I done wrong?

What should I have done differently?

Was I too sensitive?

Too quiet?

Not resilient enough?

Had they been right about me from the beginning?

Some of the answers were probably yes.

That was difficult to admit.

What was harder was learning that being wrong for a particular environment didn’t necessarily mean there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

Because for all the ways I struggled there, I learned an enormous amount from the women around me.

Heather and Hilary showed me what it looked like to build and operate a successful business.

Sigrid stuck her neck out for me when the team wasn’t entirely convinced I had enough fire for the job.

Amanda brought charisma and optimism to every project we worked on together.

Calla became my big-sister mentor, coach, friend, and seemingly bottomless source of information.

Alexa showed up with an enthusiasm I found almost suspiciously unshakeable.

Becca survived the glass-door incident and made the rest of my time there considerably less intimidating.

Karina understood my quieter disposition in a way that made her feedback easier for me to hear. She checked in. She explained. She seemed to understand intuitively that different people sometimes need to be reached differently.

And Ally was somehow younger than most of us and already kicking ass and taking names.

I admired them.

That complicated the firing.

It would have been much easier to turn the whole experience into a story about terrible bosses and a terrible workplace that simply failed to appreciate me.

For a while, I’m sure some version of that story would have felt better.

It just wouldn’t have been true.

They took a chance on me.

I took a chance on them.

For 365 days, I learned from people who were exceptionally good at things I wasn’t yet good at.

And then it ended badly.

It took a lot of rationalizing, regretting, crying, deep breathing, and replaying the experience before I could hold all of those facts at the same time.

I wasn’t the employee they needed me to be.

The environment wasn’t one in which I was going to do my best work.

I made mistakes.

They gave me chances.

I learned.

And then I got fired.

None of that requires a villain.

I think that’s what took me the longest to understand.

Some experiences don’t work out because someone wronged us.

Sometimes we try something, discover our limitations, get our feelings hurt, embarrass ourselves, learn a tremendous amount, and leave through a different door than the one we expected.

Hopefully without trying to rip that one off its hinges.

Looking back, I don’t resent the year anymore.

Quite the opposite.

At the end of the day, the Inprela team did me a solid.

Both when they hired me and when they fired me.