You know the email I mean. "After six wonderful years, today is my last day." The one with the line about how grateful you are, the personal address at the bottom, and the reply-all thread underneath where forty people say you'll be missed. People who resign get to write that email. They get two weeks, a cake in the break room and a card with everybody's handwriting on it. 💌
You got a calendar invite with no agenda and a fifteen-minute call. By the time you hung up, your login didn't work. The chat was gone, the inbox was gone, and so was every name in it. You didn't leave that job. You were removed from it mid-sentence.
And somewhere in you, weeks or months later, there's still a draft. Things you'd have said to the people who made that place bearable. It has nowhere to go, so you carry it.
The goodbye was part of the job, and they kept it
I want to name what was actually taken, because it tends to get filed under "small stuff" and it is not small. Human beings close things with ritual. We do it for graduations, for moves, for funerals. The last-day email, the lunch, the walk around the floor — that's the ritual for ending a chapter of work. It tells your mind, and everybody else's, that this is finished and you were here.
A layoff done by locked account skips the ritual entirely. One minute you're a colleague and the next you're a security concern. There's a reason companies do it that way, and the reason has nothing to do with you. But your nervous system doesn't read the policy. It just knows a door slammed and nobody said your name.
That's why it lingers. An ending without a goodbye doesn't register as an ending. It registers as an interruption, and the mind keeps circling an interruption looking for the rest of it. You rehearse what you'd have said. You wonder who knows and what they were told. You picture your half-finished project sitting in a folder you can't open.
I know this one from the inside. The Baddie Stack exists because of a layoff, and I will not pretty it up for you: the messages come for about two days. Then the quiet arrives, and it's loud. You do the arithmetic on who should have reached out against who did, and that number will sit on your chest.
You weren't given an ending. You were given an interruption, and you've been trying to finish the sentence ever since.
What the silence gets mistaken for
Here's what I see constantly with women in this season, and it's where the real damage happens. With no goodbye, the silence starts to feel like a verdict. Nobody wrote, so maybe nobody cared. Maybe six years of showing up early and staying steady left no mark at all.
That's grief talking, and I'd never rush you past it. But it's built on a misreading. Most of the people you worked with didn't go quiet because of how they feel about you. They went quiet because they're scared — of saying the wrong thing, of being next, of being seen as too close to somebody who was just let go. And a good number of them have no way to reach you at all. Your work address bounces. They never had your personal one.
For Black women there's often another layer. We're so used to being the composed one, the one who handles it, that people assume we're handling this too. Nobody checks on the strong friend. So the quiet gets even quieter, right when it's doing the most harm.
Which means something uncomfortable and useful is true at the same time: a lot of those relationships are still there. They're just stranded on the other side of a system that locked you out. And the company is not going to build you a bridge.
Write the email anyway
So we build it. Not for them. For you, and for the people who would be glad to hear from you. Here is the order I'd do it in.
First, write the farewell email exactly as you'd have sent it. All of it. The thank-yous, the names, the project you were proud of, the line about what's next even if what's next is "I don't know yet." Write it in a plain document, not in a message window, so nothing gets sent by accident. This is the ritual. It counts even if nobody ever reads it.
Second, make the list they took. Sit down and write every name you can remember from that job that you'd want to keep — the work friend, the manager from two teams ago, the vendor who always picked up, the woman in finance who explained things without making you feel small. Don't sort it yet. Just get the names out of your head, because that's the only place the directory still exists.
Third, find them where you can. Next to each name, write how you could reach them now: a personal number, a professional networking profile, a mutual friend. You'll have a route to more of them than you expect.
Fourth, send the short version to ten people. Not a group message. One at a time, three or four sentences. "I didn't get to say goodbye properly and it's been bothering me. I really valued working with you, especially on that rollout last spring. Here's my personal email — I'd love to stay in touch." That's all. You're not asking for a job or a favor. You're finishing a sentence.
Then watch what comes back. More often than not, people answer quickly and warmly, because you've done the hard part for them. You broke the silence they didn't know how to break.
Some won't answer. Let that be information and not injury. You're finding out which connections were about the building and which were about you, and it's better to know.
Last, save everything you gather somewhere that belongs to you. Your own contacts, your own email. Never again should the only copy of your professional relationships live inside an account someone else can switch off. 🔐
So ask yourself: who would you have thanked on your last day, if you'd known it was your last day?
The takeaway
This week, write the email you never got to send, and save it. Make the list of names. Send three short notes — just three — to the people at the top. An hour, all told.
It won't fix what they did or how they did it. I'm not going to tell you a few messages turn a layoff into a gift, because that would be a lie and you'd know it. What it does is hand you back the one part of the ending that was always yours: the right to close it in your own words.
They chose how it stopped. You get to choose how it ends. 🕊️
Want help rebuilding what that job was holding for you? Start here: Discover