If you’re an intuitive person at all, you know what a “gut feeling” means. It is a deep uneasiness. It is a gnawing knowing that something unpleasant is about to happen.
It’s what I was feeling back in September as I saw and heard signs that my employer was having serious issues related to their profitability and positioning. I knew because I was part of the executive team. Still, I was shocked to learn that my name was on the list of people whose positions would be eliminated as part of a RIF (reduction in force) layoff.
While I had only been with that team 2-1/2 years, it was still a gut punch. What I remember most was something I said the day the CEO told me my position was ending – much sooner than what had been described as a possibility at year-end. I said, “well, I guess now I get to experience a layoff!”
That response reflects the deepest mind and thoughts of someone who has faced and survived so. many. losses. And traumas.
This event adds to a long list of perils including: myriad abusive narcissist + empath relationships, divorce, death by suicide of my first-born … and now this. For the first time ever in my employment history, I would lose my main source of income – while my child is at university 3 states away.
In perspective and comparison to some of the more life-threatening things I’ve endured, this is a small thing. However, it stings and it hits all my triggers. My 23-year-old self who came back to NC with a suitcase full of ruined clothes and nothing else to her name, covered in bruises and pregnant was somehow resurrected in this moment. All her fears and feelings of being unsafe, unprotected, and unsupported were screaming in the background.
Meanwhile, my current self has plenty of resources and support. I have had to console the younger version of myself over and over and over again during this time, reminding her that everything is ok now. It is ok and it will be ok. We aren’t starting from nothing anymore.
I’m still sorting out my next steps and have begun to “position” myself and my career differently. Rather than applying for work as an employee, I am offering my services to clients who need administrative support on a fractional basis. This seems wise to me.
During the course of all this positioning and healing, and reassuring, I painted on top of a piece of art that hung on my wall. I recreated it into a textured, semi-3D scene I titled “Storm Watch.” It represents the feeling, the stinging, the blowing … and the beauty and the power and the hope that will now define this period of my life.
With gratitude, I will, once again, emerge from this injury as a reimagined and repositioned version of myself – more whole, more grateful, more tried and tested, and closer to the woman God created me to be.
Finding a new "normal" 