I wasn’t going to write a Medium post about being laid off but since I’ve done it everywhere else, here we are! I got laid off for the first time this Monday morning, after a brief meeting during which my colleagues and I were told that we would learn within 15 minutes of the end of the meeting if we were being laid off by receiving a calendar invite inviting us to a subsequent layoff conversation.

Because I came of age during the Great Recession and decided, foolishly, to study journalism, a famously unstable career path, I have in many ways been preparing to be laid off my entire life, so it wasn’t exactly surprising to receive a calendar invitation inviting me to my own layoff. It felt like the inevitable outcome — not because of the organization where I worked specifically, but because there have been so many layoffs in tech recently, and everyone and everything feels like it’s contracting, and because this was going to happen to me at some point in my working life, and if it wasn’t this week or this job it would have been another week or another job. It’s only surprising that it didn’t happen at a media outlet before this.

Not a real picture of me learning that I was being laid off. But pretend it is. Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

I wasn’t sure how I was going to react to being laid off, but I initially cried a lot — I just moved into my own apartment for the first time earlier this year, and losing my grip on my own finances is pretty scary to grapple with, actually kind of the scariest thing I can imagine having to deal with — and then I started telling people I had been laid off, and then I cried on Classon Avenue to Chase when he came over to take me to get coffee after my layoff call and remind me I would be fine and that I shouldn’t settle for the first kind of okay job that comes my way now, and that afternoon I cried some more because I was overwhelmed by how kind and generous everyone was to me when they found out I had been let go.

I looked at my inbox on any platform or at the responses to my tweet or at the texts from my former direct reports and just started crying. This is an embarrassing thing about me — I am often in disbelief that anyone would perform a kind gesture to me, and my response almost always is bursting into huge, embarrassing tears. I did a lot of crying on Monday, and when I stopped feeling sorry for myself I went to work setting up meetings, getting my freelance gigs lined up, and doing work. (I know I said I was going to give myself some time off, and I will, but I can’t relax until I work. This is fucked up! Nobody should operate like this! This is a trauma response and not professional advice!)

But here is a thing that bugs me about the way people announce their layoffs in different places, most notably on LinkedIn. I see a lot of posts where people decide that the LinkedIn post announcing their layoff is their chance to dust off their writing chops and wax poetic about the job that just axed them. I remember most poignantly seeing it during the Peloton layoffs earlier this year, where people talked about how thankful they were (?) in the same post announcing their layoff. “I am so grateful for the opportunity to have worked for [company that laid me off],” people say. “It was the honor of a lifetime.” Was it the honor of a lifetime, or was it a job you performed between the hours of 9 am and 6 pm because we have to work to afford things like dental cavity fillings and new sneakers? It always feels so gratuitous and silly to me. This company just made a business decision to let you go. Your instinct is to thank them??

I think I understand why people do this. What people want to telegraph in these messages is: I mostly had a good experience working for this organization. I am professional and I understand change happens and it’s not easy sometimes and this news is a result of that. I will reflect positively on my experience at your company. I’m leaving with my head held high and by taking the high road. I do not want to piss anyone off. And while I don’t blame anyone for immediately taking this tack, it always reads as so disingenuous to me, or like corporate stockholm syndrome.

You don’t owe anything to a company that laid you off, no matter how good the benefits were or how long you worked there. As they say, work will never love you back. You can always just un-nostalgically tell your network you’re looking for work and keep it moving. You can even do that in a post where you talk about your accomplishments at your previous organization. You could even say a nice thing about the organization if you wanted to, or thank specific people who you worked with, if you would like! But it is not on you as someone who had to suffer for choices made by leadership at your organization to thank anyone who cost you your livelihood.