Transitions

On losing a job you loved.. the heartbreak, the grief, the moments in-between.

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash

It was 3 PM on a Friday. As I do, I was diving deeply into a policy change that would directly impact our customers and their businesses. I wanted to understand the why — the way it would benefit or hurt people on both sides. Information soothes me. Understanding all angles, developing context around a problem — that’s how I function.

I had a scheduled 1:1 with my manager, with plenty to talk about. When I entered the call, I knew immediately. A member of HR was present.

“Oh. This is it, isn’t it?”

As much as I had quietly come to terms with the fact that the job I’d once felt completely secure in wasn’t actually safe anymore, I was still in shock. What hit me hardest wasn’t the news itself — it was the absence of context. Why? What led to this? What did I miss? Was it something I did? Information soothes me, and I had none.

My face went hot. Tears came before I could stop them. My voice caught completely. I couldn’t ask the questions forming in my head. All I could think was: Eight years. What about my team? What about the customer I’m supposed to chat with later? What about my family? (I’m pregnant and due in September).

And then it was over.

The department I had built from the ground up. The team I loved. The products I knew inside and out. That door closed, and it wasn’t my choice.

I don’t think I fully understood how much of my identity had quietly wrapped itself around my career until it was gone. My practice reminds me regularly that I am not my work, not my title — not even my role as mother, wife, or daughter. I am all of those things and simultaneously more than all of them.

But I still get enormous validation from my work. I feel powerful when I’m in a flow, when I’m contributing, when I’m genuinely helping someone through what I do. That feeling didn’t disappear just because I knew better philosophically. Grief doesn’t care about your self-awareness. It shows up anyway.

So I let myself get low. I settled into the mess of it, which is, honestly, the only way through anything.

Getting laid off doesn’t leave the body quickly. Even now, having landed somewhere I genuinely love, it still catches me off guard sometimes.. the grief comes out of nowhere and demands I feel it. A random reminder will send me back to the role I had embodied for nearly a decade, the relationships I’d built, the heartbreak I’d witnessed in the year before the end. I hadn’t fully processed all of it while I was in it. The layoff became a strange invitation to finally do just that.

So I wallowed. I let my mind wander into the what-ifs and the uncertainty. I practiced what I tell the people I love: sometimes it’s okay to do nothing. Sometimes doing nothing is exactly what to do.

I leaned into trust. I wrote to people who would understand. I reached out to those impacted by my departure, most importantly, my team, who were also let go. That was the part that hurt most. I couldn’t protect them.

I let my husband hold me, physically and emotionally. I let the house get messy. I let myself be still. I let myself dream and grieve at the same time.

What happened next still kind of blows my mind. Within weeks, I had landed at Automattic — a company I deeply respect, doing work I’m genuinely excited about. By every external measure, it was a win. A clean landing. I bounced back quickly.

And yet.

There’s something disorienting about grief that gets interrupted by good news. I almost felt like I didn’t have the right to still be sad. Like the universe had handed me an answer before I’d finished sitting with the question. I had to consciously give myself permission to hold both things at once: gratitude for where I landed and real sadness for what I lost. Two things can be true.

I'm writing this because the longer I spend in this industry, the more I notice how many of us are carrying versions of this story quietly. And I've become someone who can't unknow that. The WordPress community is full of people who built something — a career, a team, a sense of purpose around their work — and then had it change or disappear without warning. We post the gracious farewell. We update LinkedIn. We move forward, because that’s just what you do.

If you’re in it right now: the hot face, the unanswered questions, the weird guilt of caring about a customer you’ll never talk to again.. I just want you to know that the mess is part of it. You’re allowed to be in it. You’re allowed to do nothing for a while.

It doesn’t mean you’re not going to be okay. It just means you’re human, and this actually happened, and it’s okay to be with it. To let it just suck.

Lean on your community. Especially if you’re in WordPress.. this space is something different. There are an endless number of people willing to be a supportive role during a hard time. I’m one of them. You only need to ask.