After graduating college in the spring of 1997, I had a longer than expected job-search period. I finally found a great opportunity with a software company in Santa Barbara as a marketing assistant. Within two years I was promoted to marketing manager, managing people at the mere age of 25. I was the one they handed the messy assignments to. I loved the place. I would have told you, without hesitating, that I was one of the last people they would ever let go.
The day it happened, I was blissfully naive. Chatter around the office began to swirl as the HR manager parked herself in the conference room and various team managers approached individuals at their desks, asking if they could step in for a minute. You could watch it moving through the building.
Knowing how strong my annual reviews were, I kept going that day at 100%. Meeting with the people I needed to meet with, moving projects along. I wasn’t worried, though the mood in the office grew dimmer and dimmer as the hours went by. A third of the company went that day, and every hour that passed without my manager approaching me felt like confirmation. See? You’re fine. You’re the one they keep.
They called me in at the end of the day. I was the last one.
I found out later I was last because it was hard for them. Nobody wanted to do it, so they kept pushing me down the list until there was no list left. At the time that didn’t land as tenderness. It landed like a brick.
Afterward I found the CEO, because I wanted a reason. He gave me one, and he was kind about it. They’d chosen me precisely because I was good. Someone like me would land somewhere fast, and the people who’d struggle needed the runway more.
It was the dot-com bust. It took me over two years to find another job. I left Santa Barbara, moved back in with my parents, and took contract work where I could get it. (Twenty-six, sleeping in my childhood bedroom, “Marketing Manager” at the top of my resume. Great look.)
Which is the first thing worth knowing about coping with a layoff. The most confident explanation you get, handed to you in good faith by someone with every reason to know, can be flat wrong. He wasn’t managing me, he believed it, and he still missed by two years.
Why does everyone say the layoff wasn’t your fault?
Go looking for help with coping with a layoff and you’ll find one answer, repeated with almost eerie consistency. It wasn’t personal. It was the numbers. Your job isn’t your identity. Your worth isn’t your output.
All of it is well meant. Most of it is true. And I’ve watched it bounce off people like a tennis ball off a garage door. Mine included.
It fails because it answers a question you’re not asking. You’re not asking whether the company thinks it had a defensible rationale. Companies always think they do. What you’re asking, at two in the morning, is whether you’re the kind of person who ends up on that list. “It was the numbers” doesn’t touch that, so it slides right off.
Psychology Today compares it to a breakup, and both get worse when there’s no explanation you can believe. The company hands you restructuring. What registers is that they kept other people and didn’t keep you.
So you build the real reason yourself, out of whatever’s lying around the garage. Which is every doubt you’ve ever had about your own work.
Coping with a layoff four times taught me four different answers
Four involuntary exits across twenty-five years in marketing. If the standard reassurance held as a blanket rule, coping with a layoff would feel the same every time. It didn’t.
Santa Barbara, at twenty-six. Nothing to do with my work. A sector collapsed, a third of the company went, and I got cut because I was strong enough to survive it, according to the man who made the call. He was wrong about the surviving part. He wasn’t wrong about the reasoning.
Which you’d think would make the next one easier to read. It didn’t.
Seven months into a job I’d left a good one for. I turned down a retention package and a matched offer from a bank to join a software company. Seven months later they cut thirty-five percent of the marketing team and half of marketing leadership, and I was in both numbers. There’s barely time to do anything wrong in seven months.
But getting laid off that fast didn’t feel like bad luck. It felt like a catastrophic misread, because nobody pushed me out the door of that bank. I strolled.
The one where the CEO said it was me. Trial sign-ups were behind forecast at a private-equity-backed company and I ran marketing, so the arithmetic wrote itself. What was actually happening was that we’d re-platformed the product and shipped a version worse than the one it replaced. I asked whether we could roll back. Told no.
The founder-CEO sat in nearly every marketing meeting and liked to tell me he didn’t know much, but the one thing he knew was marketing. (You can imagine.) Two months before I was laid off he told me in my review that I was holding up well. Six months after I was gone, the board removed him and the company reverted to the old software.
The one where part of it was mine. I was managing someone who wasn’t working out, the process ground on for the better part of a year, and under that pressure I said things about him to colleagues that I shouldn’t have said, in writing. A real failure of judgment. I’ve never argued otherwise. The company used it as the grounds to remove me.
Same guy, same career. One with no performance component at all. One that was pure timing but felt like my fault because of a choice I’d made. One where the stated reason was me and later evidence cast serious doubt on it. One where a piece of it really was mine.
Can you tell from the inside whether it was you?
No. And that’s the most useful thing I know about coping with a layoff, which is a little annoying, since it took four of them to sink in.
I believed I was safe in Santa Barbara. I believed leaving the bank was the worst decision of my life. I believed a CEO telling me it was my performance must know something I didn’t. Every one got corrected later by facts I couldn’t have had at the time.
That’s the trap. The self-blame shows up immediately. The information that would let you judge yourself fairly shows up months or years later, if it bothers showing up at all. You’re rendering a verdict on the worst evidence you’ll ever have. Would you convict anyone else that way?
The Next-Time Test: a saner way of coping with a layoff
What finally helped was separating two things that feel identical from the inside: being introspective and being self-critical. Same fuel, same three in the morning. Introspection produces something. Self-criticism idles in the driveway burning gas.
Take whatever thought you’re chewing on and ask it one question. Does this give me something I’d do differently next time?
If yes, follow it all the way down and write the answer somewhere you’ll find it again.
If no, you’re re-litigating. The thought isn’t built to produce an answer, it’s built to keep you company.
“Should I have pushed harder on the product problem before it hit the numbers?” passes. It gives me a question I now ask in interviews about how marketing and product settle disagreements. “Was I ever any good at this?” fails badly. Twenty-plus years already answered that. It isn’t asking for evidence, it’s asking for company.
The test also gives you permission to stop. Self-criticism has no endpoint and will run eighteen months on a single tank. Introspection finishes. If you’ve circled the same three weeks since spring without producing one thing you’d do differently, that’s a loop, and loops don’t break themselves. It overlaps with learning to trust yourself again without being the same problem. Self-trust is about believing your judgment going forward. Coping with a layoff is about looking back without turning it into a character reference.
What if part of it really was yours?
Almost everything written about coping with a layoff assumes you’re blameless and works backward. When part of it actually was you, that advice makes you feel like you’re reading someone else’s mail.
There’s a minority position running the other way, that you’re always at least partly to blame. Ask a Manager hosted a long argument about it, and the readers took it apart, mostly on the grounds that real situations don’t cooperate with blanket rules.
Absolution or accusation, with nothing in between. Which is exactly where most people coping with a layoff actually live.
Here’s what my fourth exit taught me. I did the thing. Nobody made me do it. When it surfaced I found the full record myself, handed it over, and owned it, and I’d make that call again.
I also still believe the response was disproportionate. That belief doesn’t erase what I did, and what I did doesn’t make their response the only one available to them. Both are true. It took years to hold them at the same time.
For a long stretch I could only hold one, and guess which. When part of it is yours, your brain wants to make all of it yours, because a clean story hurts less than a complicated one even when the clean story is worse.
So don’t talk yourself out of the part that was yours. Own it in one sentence and stop. Out loud, something like: I vented about someone I managed, in writing, and that was wrong of me. Full stop. Don’t let one true sentence recruit a hundred that aren’t. Owning a mistake is finite. Deciding what it says about you is where the damage happens.
Then run the test on it, because owning it isn’t the same as learning from it. Mine came out simple enough: when the pressure of managing someone out has nowhere to go, it needs to go up or stay private, never sideways to colleagues. It took a termination to produce one sentence, which is a lousy exchange rate. But it’s an answer.
When the lesson has nothing to do with your performance
Not every lesson from coping with a layoff is about how well you did the job. Some are about what you believed the arrangement was. Those lessons still count, and they don’t require an indictment of your performance. What turned out to be wrong was a belief about the company, not a judgment about you.
Santa Barbara gave me mine, and it took years to surface. I’d been loyal to that company in a way I’d now call structural. Not just committed, invested. Underneath it sat an assumption I’d never examined: that the loyalty ran both ways, and giving that much bought me something.
It doesn’t. There’s no loyalty in business, not as an obligation flowing back to you. The CEO said the quiet part out loud in the kindest language available when he told me they let me go because I was good. Your value to us and our obligation to you are unrelated quantities. He wasn’t being cruel. He was being accurate.
That lesson curdles easily. I didn’t stop giving. I’m not capable of half-doing a job. What changed is that I stopped treating loyalty as an insurance policy I was paying premiums on. It doesn’t buy protection. Knowing that going in is worth more than any severance package I’ve received, and I’ve received a few.
You can learn plenty from a layoff that wasn’t your fault.
What are you screening for now?
Coping with a layoff is supposed to point forward. If everything you’re producing is about the past, you haven’t finished the work.
A founder who can’t let go of a function is a structural risk, not a personality quirk. I missed that flag completely. Someone sitting in every meeting of a team he doesn’t run, telling the person he hired to run it that he already knows the discipline, is telling you how decisions get made when things go sideways. I now ask who breaks the tie between functions, and whether the answer is a process or a person.
I separate decisions from outcomes now. Leaving the bank was a sound decision with a lousy outcome. Collapsing those two is how you end up unable to decide anything. I’d make that call again with the information I had.
And I ask what happens when the numbers miss. Some organizations go looking for the cause. Some go looking for the person. You can’t guarantee the answer before you sign, but you can ask questions that make it harder to hide. If you’re weighing a move, be deliberate about the decisions to make before a career pivot instead of reacting to the last place that hurt you.
None of that exists without the four exits. That’s what introspection buys you when you’re coping with a layoff. Not absolution, not a verdict. A better screen.
Where coping with a layoff actually leaves you
I’m not going to tell you it works out. Three of my four exits were followed by stretches of unemployment measured in years, not months. The current one isn’t finished. I stopped applying and started building instead, and I still wake up most mornings thinking about how to make the money work.
But something did resolve, and it wasn’t what I expected. The question about my worth and the question about my income turned out to be two different questions. I had them welded together for twenty-five years. I know what I’m good at now, whether or not anyone’s currently paying me for it.
So if you’re watching the job market keep rejecting you or just feeling stuck and unable to say why, the question isn’t whose fault it was. You won’t settle that from inside it. The question is whether the thinking you’re doing right now hands you anything you’d use.
If it does, that’s introspection, and it’s where reinventing yourself after a career disruption starts. If it doesn’t, it’s the loop, and you’re allowed to put it down. You’ve served more time than the sentence called for.
And if this has moved past hard thinking into something heavier, if you’re not sleeping or the mornings have stopped being survivable, talk to someone who does this for a living. A layoff is a legitimate reason to need help.