“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
On Monday, I was laid off.
My last official day is Friday.
No one warns you about the very specific and strange flavor of grief that comes with a digital cleanout.
The dragging and dropping.
The forwarding of contacts.
The quiet reassignment of work.
The slow sifting of six years’ worth of files and folders into two separate piles: what belongs to the company, and what belongs to me.
Mountains of artifacts that under normal circumstances could only suggest, I did not particularly deserve this fate and I am in fact an asset to the business.
I have a hard time letting go.
Of places. Of people.
And, apparently, of folder structures.
It’s the Virgo in me: sentimental, but alphabetized.
The whole exercise left me feeling a little fragile.
It turns out that when you spend six years at the same company, your hard drive is no longer just a hard drive.
It’s like this bizarre, company-issued time capsule. History preserved. And I was embarking on one last archaeological dig.
You don’t just find campaign briefs, performance decks and deliverables so old they were never touched by AI (fossils, more or less).
You find the ghosts of the girl you were when you built them.
I found the version of me who signed the lease on her first, very own apartment.
The one who buried her head in pivot tables to survive some ugly heartbreaks
The one who spent seven months logging on from Airbnbs scattered across the country, joining meetings with a new view in the back every couple of weeks.
The girl who fought nervously for her first promotion.
And then her second.
And then her third.
And buried somewhere in the more recent archives, the woman who went offline for maternity leave and logged back in a mother.
The last six years of my life have unfolded like a series of tectonic shifts.
But when everything outside of work was breaking, blooming or bending, my team on the other end stood still.
They were the people I spent forty hours a week with while I navigated the most defining, chaotic and beautiful years of my adult life.
They watched me grow up.
They watched me grow up.
They threw me a surprise baby shower in a boardroom.
They send Christmas cards.
They insist I crash at their place when I’m passing through town.
They celebrated the milestones, held space for the messy parts, and provided a steady, reliable hum of normalcy as the rest of my world continued to move.
Colleagues, technically.
Family, mostly.
I recently wrote about how there is something merciful about an ending that announces itself.
I’d like to note, for the record, that a few days’ notice is less mercy and more logistics.
Still, I am not sitting here tonight filled with mourning or spite.
It’s hard to be mad at a closing door when you walk away from it carrying so much.
Tomorrow, my laptop gets wiped.
Six years of me, restored to factory settings.
And honestly, that’s fine. The files only ever held the evidence.
The rest remains with the people who were there to watch it all come to life.
Didion wrote about losing touch with the people we used to be.
I’m more concerned with the people who rooted for every version.
There’s no remote wipe for that.
And so, I am closing this chapter with new skills, sharper instincts and a handful of friendships I never would have expected to find in a corporate directory.
When one door closes, another one opens.
Right? That’s how the saying goes?
I’ll bring references and an immaculately organized folder structure.
If you know a guy who happens to know a guy, please put in a good word for me.
