BONUS: 5 Lessons From a Year that Nearly Broke Me
A Brief Reflection Before I Begin Year 26.
My 25th year of life was a year of building, collapse, and rebuilding.
It tried its best to humble me, and in many ways, it succeeded.
I was laid off from my first professional job, wrestled with financial anxiety, felt chronically short on time, and experienced many periods of numbness, shame, and vague frustration with life.
But zooming out, it was one of the most formative years of life so far.
I moved into a new apartment, living with my partner for the first time. I renewed my energy by exercising more and eating cleaner. I was visited by close family multiple times, and joined a once-in-a-decade hiking trip with 10 of my childhood friends.
Most recently, I started a graphic design business from scratch, and began my side-project of writing online each week.
At the tail end of the year, I had the chance to take a hard look at the life I was building, and how I plan to move forward with it.
Here are five lessons I’m bringing with me into next year. None of them were painless, but each one of them was necessary.
Your job doesn’t love you back.
My layoff occurred in September. I was let go without notice or reason.
The conversation lasted four minutes; there wasn’t much to say. Immediately afterwards, I packed my belongings in my backpack and left the office for the last time.
The part that stung was the fact that I had taken that job seriously. I stressed over deadlines, prepared for weekly meetings, lost sleep (and some hair) over things that were ultimately negligible to the company that let me go.
The takeaway shouldn’t be that your employer is heartless, or that you aren’t worthy of your role. I doubt either one is true. It speaks to the fact that you can be cut at any point, for virtually any reason, even reasons you have nothing to do with.
This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though. Actually, it’s extremely liberating.
Knowing you’re replaceable means you don’t need to tie your entire identity to your job, allow it to rob you of your sanity, or let it take significant focus away from the things that matter most to you.
The sooner you accept this reality, the sooner you can start quietly building something that’s truly yours… something that can’t be taken from you in a single conversation. Luckily, I was already building the foundation of my own project in the months prior.
Once you have a fallback option, the stakes of everything drop dramatically, and you can transition to something new much more smoothly.
