Humanness in Being Let Go

Welcome back, Humanness Heroes.

This post opens a new arc, one I want to spend the next several posts with. It is about what humanness asks of us when the ground shifts underneath, in the seasons of work and life, where identity gets tested, and most of the available language fails the people inside the experience.

I want to start with one of the most common, most identity-disrupting, and most poorly handled experiences of professional life: being let go.

Iris

Iris had been at the company for nine years, long enough to know which conversations happened in person and which ones happened in a calendar invite. The calendar invite arrived on a Tuesday morning, fifteen minutes after a senior leader’s assistant sent her a brief message that said only, “Can you make time today?”

By the time she sat down across from her manager and the HR business partner, she already knew. She had not been told what the meeting was, but she had been in the work long enough to read the choreography: the manager’s tone, the HR person’s body language, the way her name had appeared on a calendar she did not control.

The words used were carefully chosen: alignment with strategic priorities, difficult decision, not a reflection of her performance, effective end of day, transition support available, a package she would receive in writing within the hour.

She nodded, mostly. She asked one question that she did not really need the answer to. She thanked the HR person, which she would later not remember why she did.

Then she walked to her desk to pack up things she had stopped noticing were hers: a coffee mug, a jacket she had left there for a year, two photographs of her children that had been there long enough that the tape had yellowed, and the small ceramic bird that someone she could no longer remember had given her at her last promotion.

She did not cry on the walk to her car, but she did cry later, in the kitchen, while her partner was at work, the children were at school, and the house was so quiet she could hear the clock above the stove.

What the Days After Held

What followed was not what she expected.

She had imagined grief, and there was grief. She had imagined anger, and there was some. What she had not imagined was the strange, hollow administrative work of being uncoupled from a place that had held her professional identity for nearly a decade: the Slack notifications that stopped, the email that auto-replied, the shared documents whose access expired, and the calendar that emptied on its own.

The system did not have a way of pausing to mark what she had been to it. It simply continued, with her removed. The work went on without her, and the people who had been her colleagues continued their meetings, their projects, and their lives, and most of them did not reach out for a long time, and some never did.

This is one of the quieter realities of how organizations end relationships: not malice, just the institutional fact that the work is what holds the relationships in place, and when the work goes, most of the relationships go with it, not all, but more than she expected.

What she had not anticipated was how many people were watching her, not in any aggressive way, but watching nonetheless. Her LinkedIn was checked. Her posts, when she made them, were read carefully for signs of how she was doing. Other people who had been let go before her reached out, sometimes with care and sometimes with a kind of curiosity, wanting to see how she would handle the thing they were no longer in the middle of.

And from her side, she felt the pressure to perform something: the right combination of resilience and humility, of moving on and being grateful, of having a plan and not seeming desperate. The dominant scripts in the air, she noticed, were either performative thriving (the LinkedIn post about how this had turned out to be the best thing that ever happened) or quiet shame (the long silence, the disappearance from the platforms, the sense that she had failed in some way she would not name).

She did neither, mostly because both required more energy than she had.

What the System Removed, and What It Did Not

The hardest thing to hold in the months that followed was that the system had removed her role, and it had no language to distinguish between the role and her.

The role was real. The role had structure, salary, responsibility, and identity. The role was a way of being in the world that had been hers, that had organized her days, her sense of competence, and her place in conversations. When the role went, all of that went with it.

But the role was not her. That distinction, which sounds simple, is the work, because most of the language available to her, from the company, the people watching, and from her own internal narration, refused to create it. The company said her role had been eliminated, but the meeting had been about her, and the package she signed was about her, and the conversation she had with her partner that night was about her. The role’s removal was the system’s act; the person being un-roled was (is) a human being.

What Remained

What remained for her was something quieter than what she had been before, and slower.

She still knew things. She still knew how to read a complicated stakeholder situation, how to write a tight project plan, and how to settle a meeting that was about to spiral. None of that knowledge left when the role did. There was just no way of certifying her knowledge after the role ended, and her LinkedIn could not display it in the way her title had, but the knowing was hers and the system had not removed it.

She still cared about people. She still cared about good work, about doing things with rigor, about treating colleagues with respect. None of that had come from the role; all of it had been hers.

What had changed was that none of those things were currently being witnessed. The role had been the place where her knowing and her caring met other people’s attention. Without the role, there was no daily forum for those parts of her to be seen.

And that was the part that surprised her most: not the loss of income, not the loss of structure, not even the loss of identity, but the loss of being witnessed, which is its own kind of grief, and one that the available language for being let go does not quite hold.

What Humanness Asks

This is not a piece about how to bounce back, because bouncing back is a frame that tells the reader what they should already be doing instead of asking what they are actually inside of.

It is a piece about staying recognizable to yourself when a system removes the role; most people watching cannot tell the difference between the role and you, and, on the hardest days, neither can you.

The work is not to perform resilience for the watching audience, nor to disappear into the silence the audience also rewards. The work is to remain a person, slowly, without rushing to repackage what has happened; to let the experience be what it is, neither a setup for a triumphant return nor evidence of failure but something in between, with its own weight, in its own time.

And, where you can, the work is also to remember that the knowing and the caring you carried into the role did not leave when the role did. They are quieter now, and they are not currently being witnessed, but they are yours, and they will be there when you find the next forum for them, whatever that ends up being.

If you are inside this right now, Humanness Heroes, I see you. The system removed the role; it did not remove you. The work is to know that, even on the days when nothing else does.