Before you can fail to get a new job, you must succeed in losing your old job. There are many ways this can happen, but for you it is a common one: you are laid off, along with many of your colleagues, for budgetary reasons.

Until this time, you work fairly happily on the marketing team of a nonprofit. Then one morning you receive a mysterious calendar invitation from an executive leader you have never spoken to before. You message your manager, who has received the same invitation at a different time. Neither of you worries much about it. The executive is new to his position, and you assume he is arranging meet-and-greets.

But when you enter the meeting, which happens by video because you work remotely, the leader’s face does not say meet-and-greet. It says meet-and-say-goodbye. The man you do not know starts talking about how difficult it is to have difficult conversations. For a few moments, you do not understand what is happening. Then you do.

“Oh, you are laying me off!” you say, with sincere surprise. At first you are relieved to have figured out what this strange meeting is about. Then you are taken aback, and unsure how to proceed. This hasn’t happened to you before.

The man you have never met until now looks at you with something that is like pity but is not pity. For some reason, although the leader is, starting exactly now, no longer a leader of you, you want to impress him by responding well.

You ask, “What happens next?”

“Losing your job can be a shock,” he says. “Take some time to be with your family.”

You feel like you’re in a movie scene where a doctor has given you a terminal diagnosis. You think of times before, in meetings, when the organization’s staff was referred to as a family.

“Your email and other accounts will remain accessible for the rest of the day,” the man says.

But this turns out not to be true. You have just enough time to type I am going to miss being a part of this team into the group chat before you are locked out of everything.

Later your manager calls you, though she is no longer your manager. She has been laid off too, as was her manager. But she’s not sweating it: she was already planning to quit soon and move to New Zealand, which a few months later, she does.

[Month 0, Cont.]

Did I mention that you are laid off only eight weeks after your brother died? Sorry to say, but that’s how it happens.

Before you lost your brother, you spent a lot of time talking to him on the phone and supporting him through a terrible illness. Before you lost your job, you spent a lot of time doing your job.

Now you have a lot of free time that doesn’t feel free—it feels confining, and costly, and crushingly sad. Instead of feeling empty like a dream house you can now fill with wonderful things, your days feel empty like a haunted house devoid of what you once loved.

You begin to realize how much of your identity was tied up in trying to be a very good sister and a very good employee.

Now you feel like a very good nothing.

[Still Month Zero]

You begin to buck up. You have survived worse than this. You are resourceful. You are smart, strong, and talented. You are nothing if not resilient.

You have so much going for you: a supportive and steadily employed spouse with a health insurance plan you can join. An apartment with below-market rent. Friends who care about you no matter what. Two advanced degrees, and many years of work experience.

You are well-positioned to find something new. Plus, you are a delightful person. Who wouldn’t want to hire you?

[Month 1–2]

You begin to suspect that no one wants to hire you. But it is the holiday season. No one is really hiring, except for seasonal retail jobs.

You take advantage of your work-free time to visit your family for a few weeks. They live in Tennessee, a long way from where you live in Washington State. You rent an Airbnb and your mom stays there with you, and sometimes your sister.

Your mom brings with her the poster-sized canvas photograph of your brother that you had printed for his funeral and sets it up in an armchair. She brings his urn, too.

For Thanksgiving, your husband flies down and your dad comes over and you all sit in the rented space together, the living and the dead, eating turkey and pie.

[Months 3–7]

Something interesting happens. You get a call from the project manager at your old organization saying it turns out they need someone to do the job you used to do after all.

Because the people who decided which positions would be eliminated didn’t have a full understanding of what you and your manager did, they thought they could get by without you just fine. Then things went to hell.

“We’ve been approved to hire a contract worker to do the job part-time,” your old colleague, whom you like very much, says. “Are you interested?”

Because you want to work and make money, you are interested. After all, it isn’t your old team’s fault that someone higher up decided you weren’t important enough to keep around. Why should they be the ones to suffer?

You say yes and are hired as a contractor. It’s a little awkward to return as someone who is sort of on the team but sort of not, but everyone is nice to you and relieved to have someone there who knows how to do your job.

You now only have twenty hours a week to do the eighty hours of work you and your manager had been doing together. You try to stay on top of things. You feel like you’re killing it. Surely now the leadership will see the value of what I do, you think.

And they do! In fact, they understand so fully that they open a new full-time line for your job, which only half a year ago had been eliminated.

You don’t find out about the creation of this new/old position until a recruiter messages you on LinkedIn and asks if you are interested in applying. She has obviously missed in your profile that you used to have this exact full-time position and now do not. You congratulate her on finding both the best and worst candidate she possibly could have. She does not respond to your message.

At work you ask, What’s going on here? You are told that, yes, the company is actively recruiting for a person to replace you. Unfortunately, you do not qualify to apply for the job you previously held and currently hold. You ask why but aren’t given a reason, and the VP denies your request for a meeting about it.

Later you are told by someone outside of your team that because there are rules restricting how quickly someone can be rehired after being laid off, it’s possible you shouldn’t even have been brought back as a contractor.

You are told your contract will end in two weeks. You are really losing the job this time, for good.

A new employee is hired and begins before your contract expires. You attend the same meetings for a week. Her name rhymes with yours.

You are asked if you will train her before you go. Despite wishing the new woman with your old job well, you politely decline.

[Month Zero, again.]