The gift I spent a career avoiding

We have developed a strange etiquette around losing a job. Once someone finds a new direction, the loss is supposed to become a gift. The career change explains the firing. The business explains the layoff. Whatever they managed to build afterward becomes evidence that the disruption was good for them all along.

It is a very convenient way to tell a story. By the time we call it a gift, someone else has already paid for it.

I spent my entire professional career actively working to avoid receiving this particular one. I took the relationship between effort and stability seriously. I worked in public safety technology, took on responsibility, and understood keeping a job as part of keeping a life functioning. I was hardly alone in that understanding. Most people are working toward some version of continuity, including the freedom to make a change when they can afford to make it.

On December 12, 2025, just under two weeks before Christmas, I was fired. The explanation I received was performance, without specifics I could use to understand it. I had never received a bad performance review or been placed on a performance improvement plan. Christmas became a period of figuring out unemployment, healthcare, and how to make ends meet, without a familial safety net underneath any of it.

That is the concrete part. The more interesting part is what we ask a person to make of it afterward.

The price of the gift

I've heard leadership describe being let go as one of the best things that can happen to someone. It pushes them to change. There may be truth in the eventual change, but the generosity of that interpretation depends heavily on where you are standing. It is much easier to imagine another person's reinvention than to account for the days they must live through before the story becomes presentable.

The gift arrives with expenses. Rent continues. Health coverage becomes another problem to solve. The person still has the body, obligations, and circumstances they had before that Friday morning call, with fewer resources for managing them. A professional turning point can look remarkably like an administrative emergency while you are actually inside it.

We know how to admire a person once they have made something of that emergency. The recovered version is easier to celebrate. They have found a purpose, built a business, or gone back to school, and now the experience has a satisfying shape. There is much less pressure to examine what happened in the part nobody wants to put on a slide.

I find that habit concerning because it allows survival to do the work of justification. A person's ability to make use of an experience tells us something about that person. It leaves open the question of whether the experience needed to happen that way. Good things can grow out of difficult conditions without making those conditions worth reproducing.

Almost ten months later, I am building work I care deeply about and studying public health. I can see possibilities I couldn't see last December. I also know how much effort went into reaching a point where I could see them. I am reluctant to put someone else's name on the gift tag for work I had to do myself.

Where the responsibility stops

I'm a geographer. My education taught me to pay attention to relationships between people, places, and systems. Much of my career involved technology intended to help people in an emergency. The human consequences were the reason the machinery mattered.

Many of the people I worked alongside had similar educational backgrounds. That made one experience particularly difficult to forget: asking for humanity and being met with responses centered on responsibility to the job, the business, the company. I remember desperately trying to explain to leadership that I was a human experiencing something human. The distinction between attending to the business and attending to the person seemed much firmer from the other side of the conversation.

I had been a manager too. I knew the advice that HR serves the company, along with the instruction to send employees there when they needed help. Later, I was the person being sent. The same referral can feel responsible from one side and incomplete from the other. A process gives someone a destination. Whether help is waiting there is a separate matter.

This is the part of institutional life I keep returning to. Each person can have a defensible account of their own role while the person moving through the roles never receives a sufficient response. The responsibility has been divided into manageable pieces. The consequences arrive together.

A company has boundaries. A life continues across them. When employment ends, the health and financial effects can move into a household, a clinic, a benefits office, or another person's already limited capacity to help. Those effects may disappear from the organization's view without disappearing from the world. I think we should remain interested in what happens beyond the point where an institution considers its part complete.

A different room

This summer, I started a master's in public health. One sentence in my Foundations of Public Health syllabus has stayed with me: “Public health is not a neutral technical enterprise.”

The course asks us to examine positionality: how our history, training, and place within institutions shape what we notice and what we may be positioned to miss. It also asks us to consider obligations around unfair distributions of power, resources, and opportunity. Those questions give the human context a place in the analysis. They require us to examine the position from which a decision starts to look reasonable.

At the welcome event, faculty and students were discussing difficult subjects openly. Research sat alongside lived experience and different ways of understanding the world. When we asked one another, "why public health", several people described knowing they belonged there before they quite had the language to explain why.

I recognized that answer. I had said something similar earlier in the year. I knew what I cared about, but I was still looking for a place where the questions belonged together.

The room felt like a fever dream. I was listening to people bring the complicated parts of being human into a conversation about the work they wanted to do. Those circumstances gave us something to examine. After years of considering how much human context a professional setting could accommodate, being invited to look more closely at it was a culture shock.

That experience has stayed with me more than any polished explanation of why I chose the degree. I could hear people trying to understand the reality we are living in and deciding what they might contribute to it. An unfinished answer was enough to begin.

What the body has to carry

Work belongs in that conversation. We have built arrangements in which a job can determine income, access to health coverage, the time available for rest, and the ability to plan. A decision about employment can reach several of those things at once. Treating it as a purely professional event gives us a very narrow account of what actually changes.

The World Health Organization identifies excessive workloads, limited control, poor support, and job insecurity as risks to mental health. Its recommendations include changing working conditions themselves. The Surgeon General's workplace framework likewise connects work with physical and mental well-being, including the need for adequate rest and financial security.

People living with chronic illness are carrying those working conditions into lives that already require care. An employment change can become a question about treatment, housing, or how much uncertainty someone can absorb. There is a health issue here long before anyone reaches the point of being visibly unable to cope. I want us to become less comfortable waiting for that point before questioning the arrangement.

I also want us to examine the reassurance offered to the people who remain. A workplace may use the language of family, and relationships inside it may be warm and sincere. People still deserve to understand what commitments exist beneath that language. Affection tells you something about a relationship. It gives you much less information about what will happen when the organization's priorities change.

Workers should be able to inspect that distinction while they still have a paycheck. Requiring someone to leave before they can question the conditions would make scrutiny a privilege for people who can finance their own exit. Plenty of people need the job they have. A healthier working life has to be available to them too.

I am choosing to build my work differently. Public health is helping me find language for questions that were already following me around. The question I keep returning to is how much of a person's life a system is willing to see, especially when seeing it would require the system to change something about itself.

Perhaps being fired will eventually become one of the best things that happened to me. I can leave that possibility open without agreeing that this is a reasonable way to help a person grow. Whatever comes next will also contain my effort, my decisions, and help from people who chose to offer it.

If I eventually call it a gift, I would like to be the one who gets to say what the gift was.