Presence After the Layoff
The first layoff never leaves you.
Not in your body. Not in your bones.
Mine arrived when I was 25.
New mother. No degree. Five years into a corporate role I thought I’d retire from.
The call came during maternity leave.
My role — along with hundreds of others — was moving overseas.
I remember staring at my two-month-old. Then my two-year-old.
Then the blank space where my certainty used to live.
Here’s what no one tells you:
Layoff isn’t just a career event. It’s a nervous system event.
The body registers the threat long before the mind can make meaning of it.
→ You are no longer needed.
→ You are no longer chosen.
→ You are no longer safe.
It doesn’t matter how rational you are.
The body hears the message — and it floods.
Anxiety. Doubt. Grief.
And the quiet, desperate urge to do something — anything — to reclaim a sense of worth.
I cycled through all of it.
→ Fear that no one would hire me.
→ Shame that I had built so much on a foundation that could be taken away with one call.
→ The crushing awareness that my livelihood was now uncertain — and two small humans were looking to me for answers.
This is where presence work begins — not in the ideal moments, but in the floor-drop moments.
Career presence is not about always standing tall.
It’s about standing again — when the system has taught you to fold.
I had to learn this the hard way.
Here’s what I know now:
You can honor grief and still reclaim clarity.
You can feel destabilized and still choose self-leadership.
You can name the trauma and still hold space for what’s next.
Layoff is not a personal failure.
But how you meet yourself in its aftermath becomes a profound act of leadership.
Presence looks like this:
→ Letting the nervous system settle before you rush to rebuild.
→ Allowing support — without shame.
→ Leading your next career chapter from self-alignment, not panic.
Eighteen years and several pivots later — the work continues.
I still feel the imprint of that first layoff.
But I no longer live from it.
I choose — every chapter since — to lead from presence, not survival.
And that is a practice worth protecting.
This piece is part of The Edit — presence-first leadership narratives from The Co.
