Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
Part 14 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series
Belief: Grief is only for death — a layoff doesn’t earn it.
Reality: Grief is the loss of an imagined future, and a layoff takes that away, whether you keep your job or not.
Action: Name the loss, find small moments of joy, and let meaning come — in that order.
Welcome back to Things I Wished I Knew Sooner, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life — and everything nobody told us along the way. This week, that includes grief: how it extends far beyond funerals, and how letting yourself process it can clarify what matters most.
Last week I wrote about surviving a layoff and not knowing what to do with that — keeping my job while my manager didn’t, and sitting in the strange in-between of relief, grief, fear, and guilt ever since.
This week, I wanted to go deeper and learn more from this experience. So I sat down with Dr. Megan Shen, a social psychologist and Associate Professor at Fred Hutch Cancer Center who studies grief, end-of-life care, and how people navigate serious loss — and whose TEDx talk on resilience has brought that work well beyond the clinic.
What I learned from her gave me permission to process my loss differently — grief as a language for what I was feeling, rather than something to bury and push past.
There’s an unspoken rule in tech after a layoff: be sad quietly, move quickly, get back to work.
Notice the word grieve is often missing. We can be sad, but I’ve rarely seen the word grief used in corporate communications. And underneath that observation is a belief most of us hold without examining it — that grief is reserved for death, for funerals, for losses big enough to justify the weight of the feeling.
A layoff doesn’t make the list — you still have your health, nobody died, and other people had it worse. So you push the feeling down and tell yourself to be grateful.
Even after May 5th — after watching my manager get let go and being moved to a new team — I told myself I didn’t have the right to grieve. I still had a job, so what was I so sad about? It turns out, quite a lot, but I didn’t have the language for it yet.
Megan defines grief simply: the loss of an imagined future.
Not just death — any future you assumed would happen that suddenly won’t: the team you thought you’d grow with, the manager you were learning from, the career path you’d quietly mapped out, the city you planned to stay in, the version of next year you were already building toward. When a layoff happens, all of that gets interrupted, and that interruption is grief, whether you lost your job or not.
Before you get transplanted to a totally different team, you’ve gotten good at figuring out how to operate within your current role — you’ve built relationships, and people know what to expect from you. Now, in this new role, you’re starting over somewhere new, reestablishing all of that, and it makes sense that it re-triggers all the doubts you had about yourself or your abilities before.
That’s what happened to me. The external change landed on all my internal problems — the ADHD, the self-doubt, the shame of wondering if I’m actually good enough to succeed in something new. The environment changed, but the problems came with me (more on that in another issue).
Grief also isn’t linear. The classic five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — were never meant to be a checklist. Research consistently shows that grief cycles back — you can reach acceptance, and then something triggers you, and you’re back in anger or denial. That’s not failure, that’s just how loss works.
And critically, job loss grief is the kind we’re most likely to suppress. Unlike death, it comes with a permission problem: “Why are you so sad? You still have your health. Nobody died.” The size of the loss determines whether society thinks you’ve earned the right to grieve it — but that doesn’t make the loss any smaller to the person carrying it.
Megan’s research offers a three-step framework for moving through grief. I’m adding a fourth from my own four years of living with layoff anxiety.
Step 1: Name the loss out loud. (Megan’s framework)
Write a list — professional losses, personal losses, interpersonal losses.
The colleague you rode the trolley with, the manager whose feedback you trusted, the team dynamic you’d finally figured out, the career path that just got rerouted.
Write down whatever comes to mind, even if it feels small — especially if it feels small.
The act of naming makes the loss real, and real losses deserve to be acknowledged. A few minutes of this is worth more than weeks of suppressing it.
Step 2: Find small places of joy (Megan’s framework)
Think of this as taking pain medication while the illness runs its course — the joy isn’t fixing the grief, it’s making it survivable while time does its work.
It doesn’t have to be meaningful: a morning coffee ritual, a show you love, a run before work.
Something that reminds you that good things still exist and that you are still someone who enjoys them.
The goal is simply to come up for air, not to solve anything
Step 3: Let meaning emerge. (from Megan’s research on resilience)
On the other side of grief, if you move through it rather than around it, something clarifies.
Values become clearer, relationships that matter come into focus, and a stronger sense of what you actually want begins to surface — more security, different work, something that makes you feel less vulnerable next time.
You probably won’t feel this in week one, and that’s okay — but this meaning does eventually come with time.
Step 4 (mine): Find your mantra.
After four years of layoff anxiety, mine is: my job is to learn and get paid until someone tells me to get the fuck out.
I can’t control if I get laid off tomorrow, but I can control what I learn today and how I show up for others. I can learn, and I can connect. I don’t have to suffer.
It’s not pretty, but it’s true — and a mantra has to feel true to work.
Megan’s is: “I can figure that out, too,” meaning whatever lies in her future, she’ll figure out because she’s figured out everything thrown her way up to this point — research backs this up, as realistic coping strategies consistently outperform pure optimism in prolonged difficult situations.
Find the sentence that keeps you showing up, then say it as often as you need to.
Grief isn’t only for death — it’s for every imagined future that doesn’t happen: the team, the manager, the career path, the version of next year you were quietly building.
You don’t have to earn the right to feel it. You have to decide to move through it rather than suppress it. Name the loss, find your joy, let meaning come, and say the thing that keeps you going. On the other side of it — according to Megan’s research, and increasingly my own experience — is someone more resilient, more empathetic, and clearer about what matters.
For me, that process is still in progress. But I know that I’m not alone and I’ll get there eventually.
Learn more about Megan Shen at her substack, website, and watch her TEDx talk on grief and resilience.
Don’t struggle alone. Talk to one of us.
How I learned sarcasm was about fear, not funny.
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