The Scarlet L 🎟️

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

Why layoff shame is backwards, and who it actually protects.

Business media loves a failure story, as long as it's a company's failure. Books and articles frame corporate flops as learning opportunities, blessings in disguise, necessary pivots. You could say most business media fetishizes failure.

But when a layoff happens, the story flips. A company decision lands personally on the people who get cut, and suddenly it's not a "learning opportunity" anymore. It's a personal failure. And personal failures are rarely, if ever, shared publicly.

We walk around with scarlet L's on our work histories. Depending on who's reading, that L could mean Learning, Layoff, or Loser. For companies parsing résumés, a layoff or a long employment gap reads as a red flag — not a good story, not a learning experience. A. Red. Flag. The more employment gaps on your résumé, the more red flags you have.

Here's what that framing conveniently ignores: most layoffs have little if anything to do with the people affected by them. Investments get cut, large clients leave, and market demands shift. This is business. And when people at companies truly screw up — say, a sales team misses its revenue goals — the people who suffer usually aren't the salespeople. It’s people like me, the people downstream who depended on those sales to have work to do.

The people pay the price for the company's mistakes. Then the people carry the shame.

Even after nine layoffs, for example, I never told my parents. I didn’t broadcast any of them on LinkedIn either: the last thing I wanted was that “open to work” banner over my face.

Meanwhile the practical wreckage piles up. Your daily routine is gone. You lose contact with your work friends. Your confidence is shattered. In the United States, getting laid off often means your health insurance ends, right when accessing mental health support matters most.

For me, getting laid off would put me into a new routine. I’d have to reduce the 401(k) contribution before the severance check so I had more take-home pay, find a way to keep healthcare, and then apply for unemployment. I even had the password for the Virginia Employment Commission memorized for a little while. I taught other people how to use the VEC’s website, because that site is a monster that sorely lacks the user experience that is my specialty.

To get a new job, you have to present yourself in a positive light when often just getting out of bed is challenging enough. That pressure to get income fast is exactly how people overlook red flags in interviews and walk straight into the next toxic cycle. I sure did that.

The advice industry's answer to all this is storytelling by crafting a narrative that obscures what is, in many cases, pain and trauma. We're coached to tell these stories as though we should be ashamed of them, like we're describing a bad habit we finally kicked.

But are these really our habits to break? Or does the system that employs us need breaking instead? Over 1.7 million people were laid off in the U.S. alone in May 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a lot of people thrown into trauma.

I've stayed silent about this for too long. I'm done with that. I want to share my story because I know that I’m not alone and continued silence perpetuates trauma. No one usually talks about one layoff, much less nine of them.

If you've got a scarlet L of your own, I'd love to hear how you've told — or hidden — that story. Reply anytime.

-Mary

This newsletter is drawn from Bad Fit, my memoir-in-progress about being a creative professional in environments that weren't built for creative professionals.

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