How to Handle Losing Your Job

Graphic by Maggie Harvey

I got let go again. If you know the feeling, you just get it — and you probably do if you survived the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

My first involuntary job loss happened during the internship that began my career. I worked at a startup with just three other employees and became the quiet backbone of their journalistic enterprise. I was great at my job until I started to ignore serious issues that I had with depression and anxiety. Instead of acknowledging the problem, I tried to beat myself into submission with productivity, which obviously did not work.

It happens slowly. You miss a few college classes and get a low participation grade. You skip an outing cause you don’t really feel like pretending to be social. And then, as life and school and work start to pile up, you spend more and more time indoors, binging shows and ignoring calls from your parents who just want to know if you’re alive.

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Working under millennials, Gen-Xers and boomers can create varying experiences, all with an underlying thread: Prioritizing productivity and deprioritizing emotions. No need to play the blame game here, we were all born into different environments and have our respective values. But this generalization can be somewhat helpful when describing the dynamic between Gen-Z workers and their bosses.

It’s this dynamic that lead to me getting let go from multiple jobs. As a member of this generation, I am being crushed under the weight of previous generations prioritizing productivity over emotional (and often physical) health, and I’m not handling it well. And it’s making me awful at my job. I watched my parents go through the worst of it, and now I’m wading through the thick dissonance of overcoming our past sins while accepting the dysfunction of the American workplace to pay rent.

Don’t misunderstand — I deserved to be let go from all of those jobs (except during COVID-19).

But what happens when you know you deserve to be let go, but you need a job anyway? And how do you reckon with the fact that you haven’t been, or simply couldn’t, perform to your fullest potential?

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THE FIRST STEP

You remember that you are in your teens or 20s and you literally don’t know what kind of worker you should be or want to be. Many of the people you are learning from at work also do not know what they are doing, either.

I’ve been at a couple of jobs now where my boss claimed they were going to start my career off, mentor me, and give me direction. After a couple of months of working, they were so overwhelmed with their own work that they stopped bothering to help me with real work problems. I often was expected to work overtime without pay. I endured racist, misogynistic, and unethical behaviors, and handled them with grace.

I shed toxic friendships, lost a lot of money and an apartment, and came back from breakdown after breakdown. I can imagine you did, too. I can imagine that you have no idea where you’re going, even though every adult in your life has pushed you to know what you want before you graduated high school.

Figuring it out means hitting rock bottom at least twice. Read that again.

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THE SECOND STEP

You are not defined by what you do, you are defined by your values. Getting let go can be one of the first times you are confronted with the fact that you’re not totally sure of your values.

Thoughts breed actions, actions breed habits, habits breed character — and this encompasses your values.

So, some stuff you’ve done on a daily basis has turned into habits right under your nose. You’re scrolling at your desk, you’re sleeping in and missing the start of the day cause you’re overwhelmed, or you’re so anxious that you keep leaving early to smoke (or you just vape in the bathroom like the rest of us).

None of that means that this is who you are — you just have to work backward with what you have. Find out what you want your values to be, and then find new actions that lead to that. Find accountability in the only cool person at your next job (there will probably only be one). Call your bestie more often, and, if you work from home, FaceTime them as much as possible. Make your favorite part of work into a game, play your music loud as hell in your headphones, and focus on being consistently okay rather than perfect sometimes.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel by following those productivity vlogs on Youtube. Just pick one thing you want to change and start there.

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THE FINAL STEP

You can participate in the embarrassment that is the corporate world because it is good for your wallet, and because, right now, you might not have a choice. It’s not because you think that is all you will do for the rest of your life. I promise you won’t be stuck. Not everyone can be a freelancer, artist, or chart-topping musician overnight, and the people who run the American workforce have made sure of that.

If you deal with chronic physical or mental illness, you will eventually be branded as “someone who is not cut out for the job,” because of the doctor’s visits and days when moving just isn’t possible. That’s because full-time work thrives on you not taking care of yourself. You likely will not find safety in full-time work as many neuro-typical, able-bodied people do. And that is okay because that is not the only kind of work that exists.

But, for now, focus less on the people that want you to prioritize work over yourself, and focus on communities of people like you. You deserve severance pay, medical leave, sick days, and health care benefits, and the best resources will be found through people who have been through what you have — not through your bougie boss.

Now take this pep talk I gave to myself and run with it.