I Got Laid Off. Again.

Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash

The first time I lost my job, I thought it might break me.

The second time, I knew exactly what was coming.

That might be the worst part about getting laid off again. The first time, there is a certain innocence to it. You do not know how quickly a career can disappear. You do not know how many applications you can send without receiving a response. You do not know how humiliating it can feel to sit in front of a computer day after day, trying to convince strangers that you still have something to offer.

The second time, there is no innocence left.

You know exactly what is waiting for you.

I know what it is like to apply for 65 jobs.

I know what it is like to hear no over and over again—or, worse, to hear nothing at all.

I know what it is like to have years of experience, a degree, accomplishments I am proud of and a career I spent decades building, and still begin to wonder whether any of it matters.

At 44, during my last period of unemployment, I started to wonder whether I had anything left to contribute.

Eventually, I found my way back.

I got a job.

Those four words meant more to me than I can adequately explain.

I was working again. Contributing again. Waking up in the morning with somewhere to be and people who needed something from me.

After months of applications, rejection and uncertainty, I had proof that I had not disappeared.

I began to rebuild.

And now I have been laid off again.

There is an instinct, when something like this happens, to immediately search for meaning.

What did I do wrong?

What could I have done differently?

Why does this keep happening to me?

But layoffs rarely provide satisfying answers.

Organizations restructure. Funding disappears. Priorities change. Positions are eliminated. Decisions are made in rooms you are not in by people who may never fully understand what losing that paycheque means to the person receiving the news.

The language is always remarkably clinical.

Restructuring.

Operational requirements.

Budget pressures.

Organizational change.

Words designed to make something deeply personal sound impersonal.

But there is nothing impersonal about losing your job.

It is your rent.

Your groceries.

Your bills.

Your plans.

It is the sudden disappearance of routine and security.

It is waking up the next morning and, for a few seconds, forgetting what happened.

Then remembering.

It is opening your résumé again.

Updating LinkedIn again.

Searching job boards again.

Writing cover letters again.

Explaining yourself again.

And I need to admit something.

I am tired.

Not the kind of tired that can be fixed with a good night’s sleep or a weekend away.

I am tired of rebuilding.

Women are very good at rebuilding

We have to be.

By the time many women reach their 40s, we have spent decades absorbing disruption.

We have built careers while caring for children and aging parents. We have taken maternity leaves, caregiving leaves and medical leaves. We have stepped away from work when our families needed us and then been expected to explain the resulting gaps in our résumés.

We have survived divorces and deaths and illnesses and violence and menopause and financial crises.

Then we return to work and are expected to behave as though none of it happened.

Professionalism, after all, requires that the messy parts of being human remain conveniently invisible.

I know something about this.

The last few years have asked a great deal of me.

At 42, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

I went through six months of treatment.

I survived.

Then I became a caregiver.

For the last three years of my father’s life, I helped care for him as cancer slowly took away his independence. Every morning, I went to his apartment. I made his coffee. I checked his colostomy bag. I laid out his medications. I made sure he took them.

Then I went to work.

Because that is what women do.

We care for people, and then we go to work.

We receive devastating diagnoses, and then we go to work.

We sit beside hospital beds, and then we go to work.

We grieve, and then we go to work.

Until, one day, someone tells us there is no longer work for us to go to.

My father died in August 2025.

I lost my job.

I spent months unemployed.

I applied for 65 jobs.

I questioned whether, at 44, I still had anything to offer.

Eventually, I found work again.

And now I have lost that too.

We need to talk about what work means to women in middle age

There is a particular kind of economic vulnerability that comes with being a woman in your 40s.

We do not talk about it enough.

We talk about young women entering the workforce. We talk about the gender pay gap. We talk about maternity leave and affordable childcare.

All of those conversations matter.

But somewhere along the way, women in middle age seem to disappear from the discussion.

We are supposed to be established by now.

We are supposed to have careers, retirement savings and financial security.

We are supposed to have figured it out.

But life does not always cooperate with the timelines we create for it.

Caregiving can interrupt a career.

Cancer can interrupt a career.

Divorce can destroy financial security.

Violence can force women to start over.

Layoffs can happen.

Industries change.

Governments change.

Organizations restructure.

And suddenly, a woman who has spent 20 years building a career is sitting at her kitchen table trying to explain to an applicant tracking system why she deserves an interview.

There is something profoundly dehumanizing about the modern job search.

You reduce decades of your life to two pages.

You identify keywords.

You optimize.

You network.

You build your personal brand.

You tailor your résumé.

You write a cover letter explaining why this particular organization has always been your lifelong passion.

Then you upload your résumé.

And manually enter all the information that was already on your résumé.

Then you wait.

Sometimes you receive a rejection email.

Sometimes you hear nothing.

And somehow, throughout all of this, you are expected to remain positive.

I am tired of resilience

There is a temptation to turn stories like mine into inspirational narratives.

I understand why we do it.

We want suffering to mean something.

We want every setback to become a lesson.

We want every loss to reveal some previously undiscovered strength.

Women, in particular, are constantly praised for our resilience.

We are so strong.

So brave.

So capable.

We overcome.

We persevere.

We rebuild.

But sometimes resilience is not inspiring.

Sometimes resilience is what society celebrates when it has no intention of fixing the conditions that keep knocking people down.

Sometimes calling women resilient is easier than asking why so many of us are exhausted.

Sometimes you do not want to discover how strong you are.

You would simply like life to stop requiring you to prove it.

That is where I am right now.

I am angry.

I am scared.

I am tired.

And I am deeply disappointed that, once again, I have to rebuild something I had only just begun to trust.

I do not have a motivational lesson to offer.

I cannot tell you everything happens for a reason, because I do not believe that.

I cannot tell you something better is definitely waiting around the corner, because I do not know that either.

And perhaps we need more stories that admit that.

Perhaps women should be allowed to talk about economic insecurity without immediately transforming it into empowerment.

Perhaps we should be allowed to say that losing a job is terrifying.

That starting over in your 40s is hard.

That being experienced does not protect you from unemployment.

That working hard does not guarantee stability.

That doing everything you were told to do does not guarantee everything will work out.

This time is different

There is one difference between the woman who lost her job the first time and the woman writing this now.

The first time, I believed losing my job might mean I had lost my value.

I do not believe that anymore.

A job can disappear.

A position can be eliminated.

An organization can decide it no longer has a place for you.

None of those things erase what you know, what you have accomplished or what you are capable of doing next.

I wish I could say I arrived at that realization through wisdom or personal growth.

I did not.

I learned it the hard way.

I learned it through cancer.

Through caregiving.

Through grief.

Through 65 job applications.

Through rejection.

Through silence.

Through wondering whether I would ever work again.

And, eventually, through finding my way back.

I know what the job market looks like.

I know how brutal the application process can be.

I know there will be days when I stare at another rejection email and wonder how many more times I can do this.

I know there will be well-meaning people who tell me everything will work out.

Maybe it will.

I hope it will.

But right now, I think there should be room to acknowledge that losing your job is painful without immediately turning that pain into a story about triumph.

There should be room to grieve the life you thought you were rebuilding.

There should be room to be angry.

There should be room to be scared.

There should be room to say: I really did not want to have to do this again.

Because I didn’t.

I wanted stability.

I wanted to believe the hardest years were behind me.

I wanted, for once, to stop surviving and simply live.

Instead, I am opening my résumé again.

Updating LinkedIn again.

Looking at job postings again.

Trying to figure out what comes next.

Again.

But this time, I know something I did not know before.

I have survived this.

More importantly, I remained myself while surviving it.

So, yes.

I got laid off.

Again.

I hate writing those words.

I hate what they mean for my finances, my plans and the fragile sense of stability I had only recently begun to rebuild.

I hate that I have to start searching again.

But I will.

Not because I am endlessly resilient.

Not because every setback happens for a reason.

Not because I am grateful for another opportunity to grow.

I will do it because, after everything that has happened, I finally know something no job, employer or layoff can take away from me.

I am still the woman who survived cancer.

I am still the daughter who cared for her father until the end.

I am still the professional who built a career, lost it and found her way back.

I am still experienced.

I am still capable.

I am still here.

But I wish we lived in a world where women did not have to lose everything, rebuild and then lose it again before we were finally allowed to understand that our worth was never supposed to depend on how much we could endure.