Laid off? Laid Off.

When one door closes…sometimes it just stays closed.

Part 2 in this series.

The meeting lasted just over four minutes. The guy who swung the axe—our fourth interim dean in as many years—asked to confirm who I was before we walked into his office. The HR professional already seated at the table wore an appropriately grim expression.

“Well, I’ll get directly to it. Your contract will not be renewed at the end of this year. We’re sorry, but it’s a financial decision.” He paused and turned a couple of pages. “You simply don’t fit the direction the school is headed.”

And that was it. A couple of notes on how I would receive the news in writing. The obligatory “Do you have any questions for us?”

I did not. What answers of substance could two people who didn’t know me before that moment offer?

Ten minutes and my future became punctuation: less an interrobang, more a merger of a hard-stop period and lingering question mark.

After 11 years, the school I’d been called a critical employee of had let me go. My alma mater, no less. A place whose students had voted me the faculty member of the year for the work I did the semester a pandemic ground the world to a halt.

The whiplash of how depersonalized that most personal of moments had been still stings when I think about that day. I know I’m not special. Millions of layoffs have happened in the same season as mine.

But, as Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, whatever the original size of our misery is, it expands to fill our emotional sense of the world. Eight months and dozens of rejections later, I’m still circling the moment, looking for some way to let it go.

But it clings to me and I’m beginning to wonder if even a new job will help me shed these feelings of failure and being failed I definitely didn’t ask for or earn.