The Death of a Career

And the beginning of a Substack

It was a Friday afternoon in early March. I had just gotten home after a long day at work. That’s when my friend called me. We had volunteered together and worked together, and he was one of those rare friends that I could count on to could sage, practical advice.

How are you holding up? He asked.

I told him about how bad my work environment had become. Nothing was getting done. Each day a new project was cancelled, layoffs loomed. Morale was in the tank.

What have you been telling your staff? He asked.

It’s rough. I don’t want to sugarcoat it. They trust me to level with them. I’m trying to be as transparent as possible. I’ve been telling them to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

What about you? He asked. Have you taken your own advice?

That’s when it hit me. I hadn’t. I couldn’t.

As if reading my mind, he said, in my experience, people in organizations in crisis never consider the worst. Humans are conditioned for optimism. Social and institutional pressures usually compel people to put a positive spin on events. It’s not so much that they lie to themselves, it’s just that they refuse to see the truth.

Now the worst-case scenarios were running through my mind. People would get laid off, the most talented people would leave, my entire organization could be disbanded or made to move to Oklahoma City. I didn’t want to move to Oklahoma City.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t imagined it. I had spent hours speculating in conversations with coworkers. But it had been just that – speculation - something that happened in the news to someone else.

I felt my stomach drop. As a strategic planner, I had spent my whole career helping organizations assess trends and risks, imagine possible futures, set a direction and chart a new course. Now, I was reviewing the trends at my work in my head. They all pointed in one direction. It was not good.

My friend’s question, what about you?, suddenly started me thinking in a new way. George Orwell said, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.” I was starting to see what he meant. Each week was getting worse. A new round of layoffs, a new project canceled, a new employee who confessed to me that they were looking for a new job. My own projects were stalled out and losing altitude. Worse yet, the stress was starting to get to me, I was distracted, unmotivated, listless. I stopped exercising. I stopped reading. I found it difficult to feel joy.

I started looking for a parachute.

I am sure that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in organizations under threat that have gone through some version of this heart wrenching process over the past five months. Will it get better? Will it get worse? Can I live with this? Do I stay or do I go?

What do we do when the future seems more uncertain than ever before? When it feels like we have everything to lose but we can’t calculate the odds.

I don’t like to gamble. The odds are stacked against you. You can’t outsmart the house. I’ve never been lucky. At least not in the gambling sense. But now I was contemplating pushing in all my chips— an 18-year career, a great boss, a beloved team— and betting on myself.

Giving up my job has been a surprisingly emotional process for me. I have never been one to overly identify with my professional identity but over the years as I became more successful my professional identity gave me a powerful sense of merit and worth, moreover as I became a supervisor and began to grow a team it gave me an opportunity to serve people as a leader. It was a game I was good at. A role I could play. Most importantly, it was a role people wanted me to play. It had taken time, but my organization, the people in it, recognized and rewarded my worth. I felt like I was part of something.

And yet. I came to understand that I would have to leave the place where I had built my career. I had never expected to stay there 18 years, and, at the end, of 18 years I had never expected to leave.

The process of leaving my job has brought of memories of losing my father. My father died in 2023 and was in the ICU for two months before he died. The hospital he was in was just across the river from my office. I would go into the office and in the afternoon, I would walk across the bridge and sit with him in the ICU. We shared some heartfelt conversations but for the most part our time was spent in banal conversations, doing the crossword, waiting for the next procedures. People would come to pay their respects, old friends, family. They would share memories, squeeze his hand, encourage him to keep fighting. The doctors were good doctors, and they did everything they could to keep him comfortable and alive, but my father understood before they did that he would not recover, and eventually he and my mother decided that it was time to call it. The family gathered, his children and grandchildren, and we said our last goodbyes.

I have had to say my fair share of goodbyes over the past month. Since announcing my departure, colleagues have shared fond memories, a good laugh, and, more often than I imagined, tears. I never thought of leaving a job as a time for tears, but then it’s rare in the course of work that we step back and appreciate what having a supportive colleague, a mentor, a champion, or, plainly, a friend can mean. But, like my father in the ICU, I knew I couldn’t stay.

Now I’m a week into life on the other side. Losing a job has meant losing a purpose, a structure, a community. I’m still anxious about what comes next. I still wonder sometimes if I made the right decision. I fight the urge to call my old colleagues and ask them what’s happening at work. I’m trying to embrace my newfound freedom even if I know it’s only temporary.

One thing that’s happened in the past week is that my mind has begun to clear. I am exercising each day. I am reading again. I am journaling. I feel more present. As anxious as I am about my economic future, I am excited about the creative journey of self-discovery that I feel I am embarking on.

To that I end, I plan to start experimenting with a Substack. It will be a place to share my thoughts on life, leadership, and policy—unfettered by institutional constraints.  Most of all, it will let me explore what comes after a career dies.

Why a public newsletter instead of private journal? As I go through this transition, I’ve been asking myself that. Then I picture my team—people who, to my constant surprise, looked to me for wisdom and guidance. I think about all my federal colleagues facing the same turbulence. I think about the advice that I would want to hear. And I realize: why not share this process?

Over the years I’ve learned that leadership can take many forms, one of the most powerful things a leader can do is be vulnerable. By being open and vulnerable, you invite people to engage in a new way and to learn alongside you. That’s the space I hope this Substack will create.

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