It happens quickly, but slowly.  It suddenly becomes obvious, though you are naive to what is happening.  You had a job before college. You had five jobs during college.  You had twelve jobs since then.  You always had a job, when you wanted one. You had the jobs you wanted.  Your jobs layered on top of each other. Your jobs stitched together somehow.  Your jobs made sense of each other.  Your pay grew from $4.25/hour to $425.00/week to $4,250.00/month to more and more and more. Your surroundings changed, from the kitchen of a pizza place to a pool deck at a university to the gym of a school; from a foster home to an office to a cubicle in the West Village and back to an office in mid-town Manhattan, then a bigger office in Los Angeles.  Your responsibilities grew and grew, from being contained in a short check list to being overflowing from a box to overflowing.  You had mentors, friends.  You mentored, you befriended. You went to work.  You went to meetings.  You went to events.  You traveled.  You networked.  You joined organizations. You went to conferences.  You made friends around the country, around the world.  You had breakfast meetings and work dinners.  You wrote reviews and received reviews and critiqued yourself every single day.

You laughed with colleagues. You commiserated with colleagues.  You worked on projects and helped push things forward.  You followed directions.  You proposed solutions.  You made decisions.  You gained respect. Your colleagues became your friends, remained your colleagues and remained your friends even when jobs changed.  You tackled problems and learned the art of graceful navigation.  You spoke.  You listened.  You shined, you survived, you shined again.  You evolved.  You fumbled.  You learned.  You did better than you thought you could.  You didn’t do nearly as well as you wanted to.  You gained experience, you gained opportunity.  You were always confident.  You always had a job and you created a career. This was a thread that made the fabric of You.

And then, you didn’t.  You didn’t have a job.  For 26 years you had a job, and then in 26 seconds you didn’t have one.

You had heard before that a person’s career is a major part of their identity.  You didn’t know how true this was until you didn’t have a job, and you couldn’t segregate the concept of your job and your career and you suddenly felt like you didn’t have an identity.  The thread, woven from head to toe, around all your major muscles and your heart and your mind, was pulled out.  Such a long thread, completely unraveled, laying on the industrial carpet of an office you had to leave.  You packed up the pictures of your kids.  You packed of memorabilia that you could take home.  You thought of projects that you wanted to ensure didn’t slip through the cracks.  You flagged colleagues you know needed help on projects so they weren’t stranded on an island unknowingly without you.  You left your ID card, and you left that pool of thread. It already looked tangled. You walked out of the building, wiped a tear away or two or three.  You had 129 texts within hours, maybe minutes. You don’t know.  It just had been 26 years and you couldn’t separate out the hours, minutes, moments, months, years.

At first, the loss seemed so big.  The loss felt so monumental.  It felt insurmountable.  You lost yourself, you thought.  Not just your wind (though that, too), but you.  You.  All your stitching was gone and you felt weak, not yourself.  You saw a girl who taught kids how to play dodgeball, who counseled a group of foster children who felt unloved and unloveable.  You saw a woman who wrote decisions on behalf of a judge, explaining who was right, who was wrong, and why.  You saw peaceful shoulders presenting to a group of colleagues, sprinkling humor occasionally into her tone to keep their attention.  You heard accolades and accolades.  You heard challenges and critiques and feedback.  You saw a woman who rose to the occasion, on a daily basis. Rising to the occasion by just showing up.  Rising to the occasion by working hard.  Rising to the occasion by thinking of her teams.  Rising to the occasion by inviting others to every occasion.  You heard job offers and congratulations, you heard promotions.  You saw mountains of projects and saw the woman who would try to turn the mountain range into tiny chunks, easily climbable.  You heard colleagues asking you for help.  You saw a woman giving help.  You saw a woman who looked away from her computer to talk to someone who had a question.  You saw a woman who would reach out with her own questions.  You saw a woman who learned to be vulnerable, because it made her smarter.  You saw a woman who put her head down, who kept her calm, who advocated, who followed her gut, who learned to trust it.  You saw a woman that kept her head up, looked others in the eye, said the hard things in a productive manner.  You saw a woman who learned not to be contrite, not to say sorry.  You saw things you got done, you saw things that you never got done, that you wished you would have.  You saw mornings you wanted to stay in bed, but you made it to the office and got shit done.  You saw your name on the notes and projects laying on the desks of people you hadn’t worked with for six years.  You heard your name being mentioned at meetings you hadn’t been part of for the same period of time, announcing “Go get Nikki Hart, she can help.”  You saw Nikki Hart, and it didn’t feel like you anymore.

And you cried.  A lot.  You said these things out loud and you cried more.  Because it felt like a kick in the stomach each time, a kick in the stomach that was no longer yours but that still hurt, still made you feel pain.  Where did you go?  You opened up the folder with the instructions on what would happen, what to do, where to go, now that you didn’t have a job.  And you weren’t in that folder.  You wanted to tell everyone you lost your job, but you didn’t want to tell anyone that you lost yourself.  Both losses felt too big for words.

Then: you drove your car, you sat on the stoop of your house in the sun, you talked to your sister, you climbed your favorite hill, you recalled things you know how to handle only because you have experienced them, you heard a little white space reappear in your mind, you corrected your son’s math problems, you drank a glass of ice cold water, you finished reading an essay on a Peruvian television show about the Value of Truth, you looked over your resume, you jotted down notes of items to add and responsibilities to clarify, you fixed your sink, you thought of a love story you wanted to write, you threw out dead flowers, you looked up the address of a professional event you had RSVP’d to.  You went and picked your kids up and you took them to the field where football practice would be. You watched your daughters ride their scooters with their best friend, you watched your son run tackle drills.  You saw the sky turn from blue to a shades of purple, you saw the rolling hills just to the south turn from a vision to an outline.  You felt a cool breeze and little grains of turf against your calves.  You had stopped crying but then tears started rolling again.

These tears were different though, and you couldn’t quite wipe them away.  They felt like you, they contained you, they nourished you.  You looked at the outline of the hills, one of which you had earlier climbed.  You leaned back on your hands, your palms now feeling the same grains of turf that your calves were familiar with.  You smiled.  Somehow you knew, deep deep deep down in the most knowledgeable part of your heart and in the clearest part of your mind, that this was good.  You have the opportunity to show what you are made of.  You have the ability to learn that you are made of something even stronger than you already know.  You have the opportunity to become the You you already are and can be better at being. You have the ability to use your confidence (which, you realize, is still there; it’s there), your smarts, your smile, your approach, your values, your experience and your ambition and desire to write your next chapter, to invite good things to you. It’s beautiful, this opportunity.  You smile with a deep knowing of the beauty.  You smile feeling it deep down where some people don’t let themselves feel anything.  You smile knowing this happened for you, not to you.  You smile because in this moment, you know what has happened is good, not bad.  You smile because somehow you know, you lost your job, but not your career and not you.  You smile because you can already see You just a little more clearly, and are excited for what’s to come.  You smile and close your eyes and imprint this feeling and this knowledge.  You imprint it, so that as you navigate the curvy road ahead, you can remind yourself.  Without this moment in time, you couldn’t show what you are made of.  And, wow, what beautiful strength you have to show.