The Day I Got Laid Off, I Didn’t Panic. I Wrote.

I’ve shared a lot about my miserable corporate job and the book that came out of it. There was a tearful plane ride. There was a synchronistic anniversary. There was an unexpected layoff. But there’s one part of the story I haven’t told yet — the part about how the book itself got made.

Because it didn’t get made the way most people imagine books get written.

There was no sabbatical, no quiet writing retreat, no cleared calendar and dedicated creative space. The first draft of You Don’t Have to Stay was written during the last month of my corporate job — the same month I’d just been told I was being laid off.

When I got the news, something in me went very still and very clear at the same time. I had been working on the book for a while at that point, picking it up and putting it down the way you do when life keeps interrupting. But in that moment I knew — with a certainty I couldn’t explain — that I needed to finish the first draft before I logged off for the last time.

Something in me understood that completing it was how I was going to mentally survive the transition. That it wasn’t just a book anymore. It was a lifeline.

So I wrote.

Every other evening, I sat down and worked on it. I was also alternating with a historical fiction book I’d been writing for six months. I couldn’t bear to lose momentum on that one either. So the evenings had a rhythm: one night for the corporate book, one night for the historical fiction, back and forth, while my days were spent wrapping up a job that was ending and trying to hold myself together.

It was one of the strangest and most clarifying months of my life. I was grieving and creating at the same time. Processing an ending while building a beginning. And somewhere in that rhythm — in the quiet discipline of showing up to the page on the days when everything felt uncertain — I found something I hadn’t expected to find.

I found out I was a writer.

Not because I finished the draft, although I did finish it, right on the timeline I’d set for myself. But because when everything else was falling away, the writing was what I reached for. That told me everything I needed to know about what came next.

I share this because I know many of you are in your own uncertain middle right now. Maybe you’re still in the job, counting down. Maybe the decision was made for you the way it was for me. Maybe you’re in that strange suspended space between what was and what comes next, trying to figure out what to hold onto.

You don’t have to have it all figured out before you start building. You just have to find your lifeline — the thing that keeps you tethered to yourself when everything else feels unsteady — and hold on.

For me it was writing. For you it might be something else entirely. But it’s there. And if you’re not sure what it is yet, that’s exactly what the book is for.

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If this resonates and you want to go deeper, you can learn more about the book You Don’t Have to Stay here.