#135 💔 I Kept My Job but it’s Still OK to Grieve.

On May 5th, my company laid off 14% of its workforce.

I was not impacted, but I’m still processing what that means.

Survivor’s guilt doesn’t announce itself cleanly. It shows up as emotions you’re not supposed to say out loud — relief that you still have a job, grief for the people who don’t, and underneath both, something uncomfortably close to anger.

Anger at the randomness of it. Anger because people I deeply respected — people smarter and more talented than me — were let go. Anger that others should have been let go instead.

I’ll never know the full picture of why. I’ve had to make peace with that. Knowing more wouldn’t change anything. The loss is still a loss whether you think it’s justified or not.

My manager was one of the people let go. I sent them a note — a list of thank yous for the lessons they taught me. It was an acknowledgment of the gifts received and the loss of the gifts that will never come. A practice of gratitude and grief process for an entirely new experience for me.

I’ve been oscillating between feeling like I can help and feeling completely helpless. At times, I’m reaching out — giving job search advice, making introductions, just saying I’m thinking of them. Other times, all I can do is say “hi, this sucks, doesn’t it?” With no other words to share.

While I grieve the loss of my co-workers, I also have to ready myself for what’s next. I’ve been transferred to a new team. Given new scope and responsibilities. I’m scared and excited at the same time. I’m happy for myself, but is it fair to feel joy in this moment of uncertainty and pain for so many others?

I don’t know, but I’m allowing myself to feel all of this at the same time. I don’t have to shut down my feelings just because the work says it’s time to move on. I can sit with the discomfort of oscillating gratitude and grief until I can process whatever I need to go through.

Dr. Megan Shen, whom I’ll be speaking with next week, describes a layoff as the pain of losing an imagined future. Not just a job — an imagined future. The team you thought you’d grow with or build together. The possibility of staying in a city, keeping a house, or doing that hobby. All of it, gone with an email and a brief message from HR.

That framing helped me because the grief doesn’t require justification. Whether you were impacted or not, something real was lost.

If you lost your job: the imagined future you’re mourning was real. You’re allowed to feel the full weight of that.

If you kept yours: you’re allowed to grieve too. Keeping your job doesn’t mean that nothing happened to you. You lost people. You lost the future you thought you were building with them. That’s a real loss, and it’s OK to say so.

I’ll be back next week with Dr. Megan Shen for a deeper conversation on grief, resilience, and how to keep going in a world of seemingly endless layoffs and loss.

Check out her TEDx talk below, which helped me this week.

Rawi