Where It Began
It’s a weird thing to have a gut feeling that you’re ‘finished’ with something and not understand why. I’ll never forget wrapping up performance reviews for my team last February, handing off my team to my backfill while on maternity leave, and signing off. I felt ‘done’. I told Micah, and even people at church that I felt like my time at Facebook was finished. Which, as you can imagine, was SUPER odd leading into maternity leave, knowing full well when I would return last fall.
The longer my maternity leave continued, the more God showed me that my time was through- the economy was tanking, attrition was seen across the company, and I continually told Micah week after week ‘something’s coming. I don’t know what, but it’s not good.’ This started back in August. I could feel it.
With the feeling of finality in this job, to say I was shocked to return to my role was an understatement. And yet, the day before my return, my brother texted me the WSJ article asking if I was impacted by the layoffs. My response to him was, “I return to work tomorrow. But I would bet I’m one of the people laid off.”
There’s no logical reason for this- layoffs are intended to be random, and they were. But I just knew.
Even as I was meeting with people those first 36 hours of my return, I ‘knew’ I would be gone Wednesday morning. When the time rolled around, about 6:15am Wednesday, as I was on the phone with two of my best friends from work, the email came through. I quietly started crying and hung up the phone. Despite ‘knowing’ it was coming, there’s something weird that happens to your psyche when you become a number, and less of a person; when you know that the higher up in the company you go, the less people know your name or your story. The elusive ‘they’ didn’t know we had our third kid, moved into a new house, and had my husband laid off earlier this year. ‘They’ didn’t know I returned from maternity leave 48 hours prior to the layoff. ‘They’ didn’t even know my name. I was a random number in a lottery, if you will.
But… I still knew my ‘number’ would be called.
