Loneliness. The cherry on top of the sh*t sundae of layoffs.
Nobody puts that in the exit interview.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you get laid off. You don’t just lose a job. You lose your people. And not in the “our most valuable resource” way they said at every all-hands meeting.
I mean the actual humans you spent more waking hours with than your own family.
I’ll be honest about what I don’t miss. I don’t miss the whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-year management trend that was definitely going to change everything – and never amounted to anything. I don’t miss the meetings that could have been a Slack message. I don’t miss the pizza parties. Eight dollars a person, lukewarm cheese, generic soda. We were supposed to feel celebrated. Bless our hearts, sometimes we did.
But here’s what really blindsided me.
I miss the light hearted humor from my co-workers that added a bit of color to an otherwise grey mission or task. The look across the conference table that said everything nobody was allowed to say out loud. You can’t explain that shorthand to someone outside of it. You just had it, and then you didn’t.
I miss being able to share the perfect work meme with the exact right person – because they’d see the resemblance with “that guy at work” without needing any explanation. Now it just sits on my phone going nowhere.
I miss the way all work stopped the second someone walked in with a baby or a puppy. Full stop. Spreadsheet closed. Deadline forgotten. Nobody cared about the Q3 report for approximately twelve beautiful minutes and it was the most human twelve minutes of the whole week.
I miss my coffee shop person. Every workplace has a coffee shop person. They’re the one you grabbed for the “we need to talk but not here” conversation. The corner table, enough ambient noise that nobody could hear you, and someone who already knew the backstory. That’s not a coworker. That’s a confidant. And there was no farewell tour for that relationship. It just quietly ended along with everything else.
And I miss the coffee pot criminal. You know exactly who I’m talking about. The person who left one strategic sip in the pot every single time so they didn’t have to make a new one. We never caught them. We complained about them constantly. And I would give a lot to complain about them again.
Here’s what I’ve figured out, a little ways down the road. What I was feeling had a name. It was grief. Not just for the job, but for the community I didn’t realize I’d built inside of it. The relationships that existed entirely within the context of that place, and had nowhere to go when the context disappeared.
Nobody warns you that the job and the people are a package deal.
The severance paperwork covers a lot of things. It does not cover this.
If you’re somewhere in this right now – missing people you’re not sure you’re even allowed to miss – I want you to know that’s real. It counts. You’re not being dramatic.
You’re just human. And you lost more than a job.
The loneliness piece is something I wrote about in OH SH*T, I Got Fired – because it was too important to skip. If any of this sounds familiar, come find me at wendymatter.com.
