Editor's note: I was debating publishing this today. Second guessing myself. Maybe it feels too preachy, too "pick me” or even uninspired. But the reality is that I keep returning to writing about the workforce because it is actually therapeutic. Writing about what pushed me out and everything I have learned about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the six years since. I say all this well aware that I just plagiarized the Declaration of Independence. But in some ways these essays are a millennial woman's 2026 version of that document. Onward amigas!
Leaving a job or getting laid off is like a funeral. Nobody tells you that, but it’s true. When I left Nike in 2020 I received larger than life floral arrangements, care packages, text messages, emails, phone calls and invitations to reminisce over lunch or drinks. All to celebrate and say goodbye. I felt so memorialized it was honestly like living through my own professional funeral, what a wonderful trip!
Record Layoffs! Corporate Burnout! Or the occasional and more eloquent: The Quiet Exodus of Women From Careers They Were Good At. These headlines are everywhere right now. But this isn’t a trend piece. It’s a dispatch from someone six years into the other side of that decision.
I have found myself revisiting what is actually lost when you leave a job or your role is eliminated. Sure, you forgo the title or the salary. But it’s actually the people. The scale of the projects. The clarity of knowing that each week, each month and each season there will be work to do. It is a ferris wheel or a rollercoaster or a lazy river depending on the role, but it’s always in motion and always moving toward the next milestone, brief or campaign.
Once you get off the ride and remove yourself from that constant motion there is a bit of identity vertigo. I caught myself after my departure from Nike stumbling when people asked me what my job was. Parents at school pickup, soccer games, chats with new friends. I struggled to find the words to define what I did outside of the easy answer I had not just rehearsed but ingrained in myself for twelve years. I found myself saying something different nearly every time. I had taken for granted how easy and natural it was to say “I work at Nike.”
What comes next, when you don’t know what to say, is the freedom to say whatever you want. Liberty, as I started calling it. That feeling everyone talks about when describing life on the other side of a departure or a layoff. Isn’t this what we all wanted? The feeling that makes us grateful for the leap or the push out the door.
I consciously took a break from working that first fall. Mario was starting kindergarten. Zoom kindergarten, which holds its own grief. We were simultaneously buying a house in Mexico and packing up Portland so renters could move in. I dove into domesticity. The logic being: if I was no longer contributing financially I should compensate by doing more of the things. That lasted two weeks. As it turns out, the freedom I had been handed did not translate into a desire to do more laundry, meal plan or organize the freezer. What it did do was make something else visible: I had already been doing a lot. The job, the house, the mothering, the mental load. It took not having the job to realize that. Which is a funny thing to learn in the middle of a pandemic while your five year old does PE class on an iPad in the middle of the living room.
What nobody warns you about is the shapelessness. Days that belong entirely to you that somehow feel harder to fill than the ones that didn’t. At first it was fabulous… A workout before noon, a proper lunch at home, nowhere to be until school pickup. And then you realize: SHIT! I didn’t make it to the grocery store yet today!?! How did I ever do all of this AND work? How was I keeping all of those plates spinning simultaneously? The answer, it turns out, is that I just was. Because I had to.
Then comes the doubt. Imposter syndrome is too manufactured a phrase for it. Too clickbaity, too clean. It is more like a deflating birthday balloon. Not a crisis, just a persistent low-grade very quiet hum following you around. The spiraling questions: will anyone call? Will I ever see a real brief again? Does anyone remember I exist outside of that job? You learn, slowly, that the answer to all three is yes. But the balloon sulks for a while before you believe it.
Distractions help. When you realize your time is truly yours you can fill it with what some people call hobbies. For me that looked like starting this substack, exploring my creativity through painting instead of just creative briefs and going for a walk outside in the middle of the day with a podcast that fills my cup.
Moving to Mexico was also part of my personal equation. A privilege earned after many years of working, saving and ultimately choosing myself over career climbing. Our town in Mexico is not cheap, but it is more affordable than the life I was funding in Portland, and that difference bought me time. I have been able to take on projects each year that keep me in the game on my own terms. I opted out of the structure but not a career. It just looks different than before. And not so different from many women I know who are making the same quiet calculation: choosing a lifestyle rather than letting a career dictate one.
Six years out I am in the busiest season of my career. More clients, better work, more inbound than I have been used to and balance truly on my terms- or what I have started calling ‘harmony’. But the more meaningful shift is that I finally know what to call what I do.
After Nike I fumbled that question for a long time. What do you do? I had a dozen answers depending on the day. It took a trusted friend, someone I respect enormously, who has built a serious career at Google to name it for me. She said: you are a true strategist, with experience in brand and creative. And that clicked. My entire career had that thread running through it. I just hadn’t taken the time to notice it.
I want to be clear that I am not here to gloat. You have seen the headlines: “how I landed my first six month retainer“ or “how to go freelance.“ This is not that. I don’t have a course to sell or a blueprint to unlock. This is just a personal reflection on the path, the messy middle, and the slow work of figuring out what comes next. There are more unknowns in this way of working than anyone’s clickbait headline will admit. You cannot cut and paste from someone else’s experience no matter how much their Substack costs. But it is genuinely comforting to know that other people are out here doing it too, asking the same questions, figuring it out as they go.
What I do now is not the big shoots or the massive campaigns I used to think defined my work. It is the upstream stuff. The consumer research, the brand building, the world building that sets the foundation for everything that comes after. The part most people skip because it is slower and harder to show in a deck. I turned out to be good at exactly that. And it took leaving a very big job to find out.
So no, I am not a teacher. Not a template. Not a lifestyle guru. Just as I shared last week, I am not more qualified than the next person to tell anyone how to go freelance or leave a big job or figure out what comes next. Because this life is not transferable. It is just mine.
I don’t know what your other side looks like. I only know mine. The in-between doesn’t last forever even when it feels like it will. What a privilege it is to be ambitious, creative, mothering, and still figuring out what a life well lived even looks like.
xx LL
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