The last year has tested us all. And chances are, we’ve either been made redundant or we know someone who has. So what happens when a job just doesn’t work out the way you thought it would? Brooke Le Poer Trench explores how to move on from a (job) breakup.

The first time I was made redundant, I was 19 years old. One day, our publisher came by our desks and asked the team to follow him into a boardroom. On the way, my editor said to me, “everything is going to be okay.” Which I would soon discover was the opposite of what everything was going to be. The magazine was folding, and my part-time gig as editorial assistant and junior writer was over. I don’t remember if I cried at the conference table or once we got outside of the room (this was many, many years ago), but I know there were tears and someone passed me tissues. I recall the rest of the team, who probably had mortgages and mouths to feed, took it on the chin. They were very calm and clearly more prepared than me. Perhaps they even felt that small sense of relief you feel when a struggling business-within-a business finally make a call. There was blood in the water already. 

My editor at the time, who I thought of as a kind of ancient, Yoda-like mentor (he was probably 35) looked at me and said with utter confidence, “Brooke, you will be fine.” How do you know that? I wondered at the time. But many years later, I get it. As I have watched many younger, truly talented and excellent colleagues lose their jobs - I just know they will land on their feet. They are at the beginning of their careers, completely capable of pivoting in so many different directions.

Still, when you are the person who is suddenly told that you don’t need to come back in tomorrow, the emotional toll is heavy. Regardless of the why, losing your job is hard. Even in normal circumstances when the economy and world is functioning as we once knew it, studies rate an involuntary job loss as one of the most stressful events on the scale of stressful life events. The uncertainty combined with  the pressure of keeping your life afloat can be terrible. And it always feels personal. 

My friend Georgie was let go from her senior management role in the pandemic, despite the fact that she’d been in the role for five years, always had positive performance reviews and hit her KPIs, and recently won her company a prestigious award for the work she had produced. “I was working my ass off—while also juggling home-schooling children and everything that came with the pandemic last year—and it hurt.” She wanted to fall into a funk, but didn’t even have the time to do that. “It’s so much more than losing an income—although that sucks,” she told me. “It’s loss of purpose, focus, friends and also the fear that you won’t get back to that spot on the career ladder. I know so many women who have had to take several steps back just to plug the gap.”  

Experts agree that the first thing to do after losing a job is to take care of yourself, both physically and mentally. My friends story is a familiar one, and the feelings that come up in the aftermath are intense. They range from a sense of failure and humiliation, to anger anxiety, resentment and shame. And in many ways the lack of money in your bank account pales in comparison to the hole it leaves in your sense of self.

That’s why the little things start to count: getting enough sleep, eating well, sticking with an exercise routine, and reaching out to friends and family. According to research, most people tend to react in one of three ways: fight (must. find. new. job. now); flight (do all the things except look for a new job) or freeze (bed, tv, carbs, funk). Noticing your response in this moment is the beginning of taking control of your stress, and starting to plot a way forward. At the end of the day, it might feel like a breakup, but it’s actually a setback.  As a wise friend told me the second, and more recent, time I lost a job, “your success is measured far less by your opportunities than by how you respond to these kinds of challenges.”

As for me, my editor was right. The next week I was offered a role somewhere else in the company (that I was completely under qualified to do but said yes anyway because my imposter syndrome hadn’t kicked in yet) and I was on my way. I’ve had many setbacks since… but after the first one, I had a little more confidence dusting myself off the next time. And the time after that.