I’m two weeks into my new job and I don’t know what to think.

I’m having flashbacks to a simpler time when I didn’t have people with enormous titles and very little understanding of how work actually gets done screaming at me to be smarter, faster, and more innovative with no resources, no support, and the quiet expectation that I should always be online to make it happen.

There were a lot of 15+ hour workdays over the past three years. We’ll put it that way.

And now I’m remembering what it feels like to wake up and not immediately hate going to work.

It’s really fucking weird.

Mostly because apparently my nervous system has no idea what to do with that.

There are a lot of looping thoughts. A lot of what-ifs. A lot of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe I’ll write about all of that eventually, but I don’t really have the energy right now.

What I apparently do have the energy for is grieving my old team while trying to pursue this new opportunity.

I talked about this in one of my knitting vlogs, because yeah, that’s a thing I do to sublimate my work stress.

The tl;dr is that at my last job, I managed a team of somewhere between 10 and 14 FTEs at any given moment, depending on which dysfunctional leader was having a synaptic misfire that day, plus a small handful of contractors.

We were constantly in some kind of emergency. There was a new one approximately every hour.

On one of my last days, I even almost got into a fight with our co-founder in a very public company chat about what his precious newly launched open-source harness was actually capable of.

Spoiler: nothing realistic.

Some people would probably say my team was trauma bonded. They’d be using that terminology incorrectly, but colloquially? Sure. It works.

And then one day they just didn’t exist anymore.

There’s a lot of discourse right now about AI replacing jobs.

It isn’t.

Maybe in five years. And yes, we should absolutely be nervous about where this is going. But right now, we are nowhere remotely close to replacing people with 10+ years of institutional knowledge, context, judgment, and relationships.

Companies are cutting those people anyway.

Not because AI can actually do their jobs, but because somebody decided they’d rather convert their salaries into tokens and figure out the consequences later.

So goodbye to my team.

There were around 30 of us in the larger group.

Then there was me.

The weird part is that because I went from being a people manager to an IC, they actually offered me the same severance package as everyone they laid off: seven months of full pay, plus accelerated vesting. Which sounds amazing until you remember that in this economy, seven months is not remotely a guarantee that you’ll find another comparable job. I have very good, very talented friends who took eight months or longer to land somewhere. And honestly, part of me thought maybe sticking around wouldn’t be the worst thing. If AI was supposedly eating everyone’s jobs, I might as well learn how the sausage got made. So I did. I built GitLabs. I pull-requested more than an art major ever should. I built fully functional tools and apps from scratch. I did the needful. I’d already been pursuing IC roles anyway, and ultimately, the experience was good for me.

There was also one other very important consideration: taking the severance meant signing a non-disparagement clause.

And there is not a cocksucker in this universe who can pay me enough to shut up about how terrible that company was.

So yes, technically, I tortured myself for another three months out of spite.

And I’m better for it.

But working there afterward felt like working in a morgue. Our group chats became graveyards, every greyed-out profile picture another little headstone belonging to someone who used to be there.

Everything got quiet.

Suddenly I had nobody to help me investigate compliance problems. Nobody to build processes with. Nobody to argue about integrations with. Nobody who understood why some seemingly tiny operational decision was going to explode six months later.

And, perhaps most importantly, nobody to rant with about the approximately 400 stakeholders I somehow accumulated across not just Marketing, but the entire goddamn company.

Don’t worry. I made new friends. I always do. In fact, I was told that I really “shined” during my last few months there, which is very nice and probably true because a whole lot of crazy people had finally gotten out of my way and I could actually do things.

Fantastic.

But you also murdered my team.

And, if I’m being completely serious, a decent chunk of my spirit along with it.

The actual layoff happened while we were in the middle of a virtual hackathon. We were literally building new tools and integrations using AI when the company started remotely shutting off people’s laptops. One minute I was in a Google Meet with my coworkers.

Then their little squares started disappearing.

Within minutes, I was sitting there alone.

It took about twenty minutes before I got an email telling me that my job hadn’t been impacted.

My whole team had.

My manager. My peers. The people who reported to me. People I’d worked beside for years.

Gone.

I had an 8 PM call that night with my new manager to discuss…something. I genuinely don’t remember what.

I was numb.

That was May 7th. And I’ve been pretty numb ever since.

Except I’m starting to realize that maybe I’ve been numb for much longer than that. At work, sure. Being slightly dissociated from the insanity was probably a survival tactic. But if I’m being honest, I’ve spent a lot of the past 10ish years doing some version of the same thing in other parts of my life too.

Also a survival tactic, I guess.

Which brings me back to this new job.

All things considered, it’s probably technically a demotion. I’m getting paid about the same, so whatever. Titles are fake and I have spent enough of my life watching people with extremely impressive ones make decisions that would get a normal person fired.

But something strange is happening. I can feel myself unclenching. And it scares the shit out of me.

My nervous system hasn’t been normal since approximately 2010. I genuinely don’t know what it feels like to not be bracing for something.

I’m sure the other shoe will drop eventually. I’ve been burned too many times to confidently announce that I’ve found some magical healthy workplace where everything will be different forever. I don’t trust anyone or anything enough for that.

But right now, for once, I don’t know what to do with myself.

And maybe that’s okay.

I spent years feeling responsible for nearly 20 people I genuinely cared about, only to watch most of them get slaughtered in front of me while I stood there powerless to stop it.

I’m not sure I’ll ever completely come back from that. I’m also not sure I want to be the person I had to become in order to survive it.

Maybe this is what coming out of survival mode feels like. I don’t know.

I feel like I’ve spent a very long time mostly existing, following whatever sparks some excitement because it lets me feel alive for a little while, while keeping the rest of myself carefully shut down.

I’m tired of being disappointed.

I’m tired of waiting for people, jobs, companies, whatever, to rip my heart out.

But against what is probably my better judgment, I’m still hopeful about this new job. I’d really like for someone or something to not rip my heart out for a change.

Famous last words, probably.