You sent the message. Thirty names, maybe more — the ones you would have grabbed a coffee with, the ones who actually know what you do. 📱
Within the hour you have four replies. Three of them are lovely. One of them is somebody you have never spoken to in your life asking whether you're available for a piece of work they have been sitting on since March.
By Friday there are four more. Most of them want something — an introduction, a favour, a referral, a recommendation, an eye on a document. Your phone is genuinely busy. Your chest is genuinely heavy. 💬
And then there is the thing nobody mentions, which is that the people who love you most are the quiet ones. Not silent. Slow. Because they don't know what to offer, and offering something they don't have feels worse to them than saying nothing at all — so they say nothing, and from where you're sitting it looks exactly like indifference.
The misread is the expensive part
You read the fast replies as evidence that the whole network is transactional. That is a fair read and it is largely correct, and I am not going to sit here and tell you it isn't. 🔍
But it is a read of the wrong sample. Your sample was shaped by speed — and speed is precisely what the people asking for things have, and precisely what the people who care about you do not. You have not discovered who loves you. You have discovered who is available. 💛
And then you do the thing I would do, which is stop reaching out. Not because you are above it. Because it starts to feel like asking. And asking, when you are the one who needs something, feels like a particular kind of exposure you are honestly not built for this month.
You didn't find out who cares. You found out who is fast, and then you mistook speed for the whole picture.
What the quiet ones are actually doing
They are doing exactly what you would do. They are sitting with it, feeling useless, trying to work out what would genuinely help before they offer you something hollow. 🕯️
Most of them are also talking about you. That part is true and worth saying out loud, because it is very easy to forget while refreshing a thread that is not moving. They are not quiet because they have stopped thinking about you. They are quiet because they care and they don't have a move.
And the ones who do have a move are not usually the loudest ones either. They are the person who sends you a role three weeks later with one line saying they told someone you'd be perfect and they said they'd check. That is not nothing. That is somebody spending their own currency on you, quietly, without asking to be thanked. 💅🏾
Three questions that tell you who to trust with this
1️⃣ Who would answer this on a Sunday, with no reason attached? Those are the ones who are not going to ask you for anything — and notice how much slower they are. That slowness is the tell. 🕊️
2️⃣ Who has said no to you before, kindly, when they could have said yes? That person is still in your corner and will still be there in four months. They are the ones worth a slow Sunday answer.
3️⃣ Who have you known for years and who has never once asked you for anything? Send those four a message this week with no ask in it at all. Not even an implied one. Especially not an implied one.
The message that actually gets through
Here is what I would send, and it is three sentences. No ask. No let me know if you hear back. No apology for the gap in your calendar. 📝
Something like: I got laid off in [month] and I'm taking a few weeks before I start looking properly. I'm well. If anything comes across your desk that you think suits me, I'd be grateful — and no pressure either way. Then stop.
Why it works is not subtle. It gives them a door they can walk through without asking you for anything, and that is the only kind of help most people are honestly able to offer. It also takes you off the hook of explaining, which is the thing you have been doing badly for six weeks, because you didn't know that was what you were doing.
Then — and this is the part that changes the shape of the month — you don't wait for the replies to arrive. You send it to thirty people over two days, and then you go and do something with your Tuesday that has nothing whatsoever to do with a job.
What it feels like once it moves
Somewhere in week three, the replies stop being about you needing something and start being about you being fine, which is a much better conversation and a much better place to have your next one from. 🌿
And here is the part nobody tells you: the best version of this is dull. One person sends something good, it is a fit, you go back to work, and you never once had to become a person who networks through a layoff. There is no shame in the efficient version. There is only a great many wasted months if you are waiting for it to feel like the other thing.
I want to say one more thing plainly, because it is the part I see hurt the most. There is a way of reading a slow reply that turns it into evidence about your value, and it is the reading that arrives at four in the afternoon, when the other reading would not. Slow is almost never about you. Slow is somebody standing in their own kitchen holding a phone, trying to work out how to help without making it about them. 💛
And if the honest answer is that you have nobody at all like that — that the people who know you professionally are mostly people you met through the job you no longer have — then that is worth knowing too, and it is worth building rather than waiting. The circle widens from the work that is not there anymore: the old colleague who went somewhere you would have liked to go, the friend two doors down who does something adjacent, the woman whose work you have admired from a distance for a year. She has never had an ask from you and she would not think less of you for one. 💗
The takeaway
Today: pick the four people who have never asked you for anything and send them the three-sentence version, with no ask in it. Eight minutes. Then do something tomorrow that has nothing to do with work.
You were not building a network that failed you. You were reading the loudest room in the building and calling it the only room. 💅🏾