Let me tell you what actually happens when you get laid off, because the LinkedIn version is a lie. 💯
Day one, your phone is busy. Heart emojis, three people who say call me anytime, somebody's cousin who knows a recruiter. Day two it's still moving, but slower. By day three you are looking at a screen that is not doing anything, and you start doing the math.
And the math is ugly. Because the number of people who SHOULD be checking on you is not small. It's the ones you covered for. The ones whose deliverable you saved at 11:47pm on a Thursday while they were at their kid's thing. The ones who called you the glue. And the number who actually pick up the phone after 48 hours rounds down to a decimal.
Nobody warns you that the check-ins have a two-day shelf life. Or that you'll notice exactly who was checking a box.
Say the word: it's grief 🖤
Not a setback, not a pivot, definitely not a season, but wholly grief. And it will come for you sideways — in a parking lot with the engine still running, in the middle of a good song, while you're doing something completely unrelated like picking a paint color.
You will be fine. You will also be on the floor about it for a minute. Both of those are true at the same time and neither one cancels the other. Anybody telling you to reframe it into a blessing on day four has never had the floor come up to meet them.
Mine was illegal. Not unfair, not unfortunate — illegal, and wild with it. The Baddie Stack exists because of what came after that, so understand me clearly: I am not writing this from the other side of a tidy little lesson. I built this thing while the grief was still in the room.
You were not a poor worker. You were under-supported. And now you are grieving because you got punished for being unsupported. None of this is your fault.
What the grief is actually telling you
Sit with it long enough and it stops being only sadness. Underneath it there's usually a much more useful feeling: exposure. The realization that your entire professional life — your contacts, your work samples, your proof of what you did, the systems you knew inside out — lived on somebody else's server. And they turned the key.
That is not a character flaw. That is what happens when you give a decade to a place that hands you the tools and keeps the keys. But now you know something you did not know on Monday, and it is worth more than the severance.
So what do you actually do 🧰
Not everything. Not a whole reinvention while you cannot even eat right. Three things, and you can do them slow.
1️⃣ Get your proof out of their house. Work samples, metrics you actually own, the recommendation you should have asked for last year. Ask now while people still remember your name in the present tense.
2️⃣ Pick the two tools that keep showing up in the job posts you scroll past because one bullet made you feel some type of way. Not ten tools. Two. That gap is almost always smaller than the feeling attached to it.
3️⃣ Build one system that is yours. Your files, your account, your name on it. Small. Petty, even. It matters more than it looks because it is the first thing in a while nobody can revoke.
Capability is part of your stability now. Not because you should want to be a tech person, but because nobody can lay off what you actually know.
The takeaway
Grieve it properly. Let it be as big as it is, and let the people who did not call reveal themselves — that is information too, and it is free. 🥃
Then, when you can, take one hour. Not to master anything. Just to move one thing out of their house and into yours. That is the whole assignment this week.
When you're ready for a real read on where your setup is holding you hostage, start here: Discover
Stay Savvy, Baddies 💅🏾.
Tech Baddie Out.