Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio
The situation
Just before my ninth layoff, in 2024, my boss Slacked me one morning: I was being "escalated." At that company, it meant a colleague had complained about me and was taking it to my boss's boss. It was considered very bad.
I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, so I brushed it off. My anxiety didn't spike. It helped that the night before, my investments had gone up by more than my monthly salary.
Rewind to 2009. My portfolio had just dropped by half. I learned one afternoon that I was being demoted, and my new boss would be a colleague who hated me. I walked out to a coffee shop and rewrote my resume on the spot. I wanted to quit right then, but I couldn't afford to.
I was the same person, with the same values and the same read on the situations. My responses couldn’t be more different.
What changed
It wasn't my character. I didn't grow a spine somewhere in those fifteen years. I built something that let the spine I already had hold weight.
That something was twenty slow, unglamorous years of saving in the gaps between jobs that kept ending: maxing out the 401(k) and Roth, putting leftover severance into stocks, skipping the luxury purchases. (The side hustles and the chasing of every hot asset? Mostly a bust.) Eventually I had enough that I could just stop if I wanted to.
The uncomfortable part
I got to keep my integrity at work because I could afford it.
The colleagues who stayed quiet weren't cowards. They had rent due and no cushion, which is exactly where I was at thirty-two. We've built workplaces where the people most able to say the uncomfortable thing are the ones who need the job least. So the truth arrives, when it arrives at all, from the least affected person in the room.
The cushion didn't stop the layoffs or heal the trauma. What it bought was narrower: permission to stop living every work day in fear.
A leadership question
Who on your team can't afford to tell you the truth, and what have you built so they don't have to?
P.S. BAD FIT is out now. If my book made you laugh, think, or (hopefully) both, an Amazon review is how it finds the next person who's been told they're "not a good fit" and needs to hear it isn't their fault.
​