The layoffs came on a Tuesday, and as I cleaned out my desk, I realized I had been treating my job title like my name, my office like my home, my role like my identity. When they took away my access card, I felt like they were taking away my right to exist. Who was I without the business cards, the email signature, the answer to “What do you do?” that had defined me for so long?
I had confused the costume with the person wearing it, the character with the actor, the role with the self. Somewhere in the years of climbing corporate ladders, I had forgotten that work was something I did, not something I was.
The panic that followed wasn’t about money—it was about meaning. If I wasn’t the Marketing Director, then who was I? If I couldn’t introduce myself with a title that impressed strangers, what was left to introduce? I had built my entire sense of self on a foundation that could be eliminated with two weeks’ notice and a severance package.
But sitting in my empty apartment that first day of unemployment, I began to remember pieces of myself that had existed before the job, that lived outside office hours, that had nothing to do with quarterly reports or performance reviews. I remembered that I was someone who made people laugh, who noticed beautiful light, who could fix broken things, who loved wordplay and worried about stray cats.
The job had been a role I played, not the entirety of who I was. I had been an actor so committed to the performance that I’d forgotten there was a person underneath the character, someone with interests and talents and quirks that had nothing to do with productivity metrics or professional development.
Work, I realized, was supposed to be something you do to support your life, not something that replaced your life. It was meant to be a vehicle for expressing your skills, not a container for your entire identity. The healthiest people I knew could lose their jobs without losing themselves because they understood the difference between their profession and their person.
Tonight I remember that I am not my job title, my company, my industry, or my income. I am someone who happens to work, not someone who only exists while working.
