When You Lose Your Job and Don't Know Who You Are Without It

"What Do You Do?"

The question arrives in almost every social context. And it's innocent enough — an easy opening, a way to locate people, a shorthand for understanding someone's world. But when you don't have an answer, or when the answer is "I was laid off," you feel the question differently. It no longer feels like small talk. It feels like an identity test you've failed.

This is a strange thing to notice — that so much of your sense of yourself was organised around a job title, a role, a place you went to be someone. Not everyone experiences this, but many people do, and there's often shame attached to how much they do. It can feel like you've discovered something unflattering about yourself: that you needed external structure more than you knew; that your sense of value was more contingent on performance than you'd realised.

This discovery, uncomfortable as it is, is actually useful. It's pointing at something real — not a flaw, but a question. What does your sense of worth actually rest on? And is that foundation solid enough to stand on when the external supports are removed?

The Particular Weight of Layoffs

There's something specifically demoralising about being laid off that's different from choosing to leave. Even when you know rationally that layoffs are about business decisions, budget cycles, market conditions — the knowing doesn't insulate against the feeling. The feeling is rejection. The feeling is: I was expendable. I was on a list, and my name was on it.

This feeling tends to be more intense the more invested you were. If you gave a lot to the job — long hours, genuine effort, loyalty, identity — the layoff can feel like a betrayal. Like the investment wasn't registered. Like it didn't matter.

It did matter. The work you did was real. The contribution was real. The fact that the company made a decision that included you on a list of cuts is a statement about the company's situation, not about the value of what you gave.

This is true, and it still hurts.

Depression After Job Loss

It's common, after job loss, to experience something that looks and feels like depression. Low mood. Difficulty getting out of bed. Loss of purpose and motivation. Withdrawal from social contact. A kind of grey that makes it hard to see what the point of anything is.

This is a grief response. You've lost something real — not just income, but structure, purpose, social connection, and a version of your identity. Grief takes the shape of the loss. When the loss is big and complex and tied to how you understand yourself, the grief can be heavy.

The danger is in the shame that accretes around it — the voice that says you should be resilient, that other people have it worse, that it's just a job. That voice is worth arguing with. Job loss is a legitimate source of pain, and the depression that follows it deserves to be taken seriously, not pushed through by sheer will.

The Space Between Jobs

There's a version of the gap between jobs that's purely logistical: applications, interviews, waiting. But there's another version — the one that opens up when the initial urgency passes and you're left with more time than you know what to do with, and the question that was always underneath the busyness: what do I actually want?

This question is available now in a way it wasn't before. It's uncomfortable because there's pressure — financial pressure, social pressure, the pressure of feeling like you should be getting on with it. But it's also, if you can find a way to be with it, an opportunity. You don't have to go back to exactly what you had. You can ask what kind of work you actually want. What kind of life you want your work to be part of.

These aren't small questions. They take more than a CV to answer.

Asclepiad is a space to sit with them. Maia won't help you write your LinkedIn profile or optimise your job search strategy. But she'll be there for the harder, quieter conversation — about who you are when you strip away the title, and what you actually want to build next.

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Identity doesn't live in a job title. But finding what it does live in takes some honesty. Maia is listening. asclepiad.ai/?context=identity