I thought I was special. I was fired.
As a 26-year-old, who has steadily moved up the career ladder in her short tenure, I never could have imagined I would be someone who gets fired. Then one day, the inevitable career rejection happened and I was so unprepared I never truly got over it.
From the time I was very young, I was the child that many people believed in. My entire family was spectacular, but they always felt or believed that I was special on another level; the rising star, the one capable of becoming a millionaire, the one that, dare I say, was destined for fame.
Now I sit here in my mid-twenties, at the very beginning of my career, being told one day that I had the most potential and then being fired the next. I always found it easy to find jobs, my connections, my family, and my skills just did the work for me. When I needed work, I found it. When I wanted to work in media, I got it, when I wanted to write for a magazine, I did it. When I wanted to start a magazine, I started it. Everything in my career had come easy to me, I just happened to be one of the lucky ones…until one day I wasn’t.
After 2 and a half years spent at a company that started off being my dream job and then ended up being a toxic place that was suffocating the life out of me, I was poached by another, smaller company. A company that offered me a way into the magazine world that I hadn’t had before. And I thought to myself “This is it. This is my big break” I didn't realise it would be the biggest disappointment of my life instead of being the one thing I had been waiting for.
I started off my new career on a huge high back in 2023, I gave it my all, negotiated a much higher salary, and finally managed to secure myself a senior position. Then when the time was right, I strategically maneuvered myself into the world of journalism and became a published writer for the first time in my life. It was a huge accomplishment. I felt like I was making it.
However, soon after that, it was all downhill from there. A colleague who was working alongside me quit and I began taking on her load, with only fake promises from my HR saying they were going to hire someone to replace her. That replacement never came, and I kept making my discomfort about handling the workload of two people very clear to everyone around me, including my boss and HR. But nothing was ever done about my issues, and yet the workload kept getting bigger and bigger because management was incapable of recognizing their staff and resources were limited.
They would invariably start events and then have to cancel them after a few weeks, because of lack of income/manpower etc. Slowly, the company began to crumble. The revenue stopped coming, the sales figures dipped, and our bosses’ stress levels were at an all-time high, and that was very evident to all of us. And very soon the layoffs began. But I still naively believed that I’d never be the one who gets laid off.
Slowly over time, my boss had begun nitpicking my work, telling me I wasn't performing (which wasn’t true), and just barking at me all the time. But I didn't think too much of it, I boiled his attitude down to stress over the company’s position, but I knew I had a lot of potential and I knew he saw it too. I hoped that he would realize that I was just going through a tough season here at work because of being overworked.
After a while, the hiring started again, but it was mostly people from abroad, where they could afford cheap labor. A marketing manager was hired, and when that happened I started to worry a little bit about the security of my job. I knew that at the end of the day, I was getting paid a lot of money and that they could get someone abroad to do it cheaper. I was then asked to have a meeting with HR, where she began to tell me that they hired a new Marketing Manager who was going to help ease my workload, and that eventually my reporting manager would change and I would start reporting to him. So whatever nerves I felt about potentially losing my job fell away, because she assured me they were working on a solution to my concern. Again, the pride I had about being the kind of invaluable employee who wouldn’t get fired kicked in. Surely they wouldn’t fire me, they care about my concern, and surely they’re working with me to ease my load, and surely they saw my potential for what it was and would be willing to stick it out with me. So I bought into the fakery and games they played with me. The very next day after this meeting with HR happened, I was fired.
Everything I had believed about myself for years began to fall away in that moment - the thoughts about being special, about being my boss’ favorite, about being extraordinary just crumbled right before my eyes. I was utterly blindsided, heartbroken, and angry beyond words. I was alone here in the city, without my family, and entirely dependent on this job to keep me afloat. I had little to no savings, I had house rent to pay, I had a wedding to pay for and yet I was thrown out of this place to fend for myself. What made it even worse was that I wanted revenge but couldn’t take it because I was forced to be cordial and not burn my bridges.
Everything in me wanted to scream at them and start breaking things, and yet I spent the next month coming to the office every day, doing my work, getting crapped on every day for no good reason, and then doing the same thing day in and day out. Somehow, God gave me the peace and the resistance to be able to tolerate the many things they threw at me after they asked me to resign. I began to realize that the stigma of being fired was something I felt very tangibly, I was ashamed of myself, and jealous of all the people that had jobs and were thriving in their careers.
A little over a month has passed since I was fired. And although I still have my days where I feel anger and sadness about the way my company handled things, I know at the end of the day that it's their loss because jobs are now being offered to me left and right. And I know, at the end of the day that I will make it, and no job can either make me or break me. Being fired was one of the worst things in my career that ever happened to me, but I believe it's for the best, because God wants the best for his children, and this company just wasn’t it. Sometimes when we get comfortable in the plans we have personally set, we forget that God has something better in store for us and His plans are way better than ours.
We all deserve the kind of place that can recognize and appreciate us for who we are - human beings; employees, not robots, not anyone’s slave, not anyone’s punching bag - humans whose value cannot be bought. So if you’re someone reading this and you’re having trouble at your job, or you can relate to being fired, know that something better is coming along, and you deserve the very best.
Sometimes companies can't see your value, sometimes they’ll see it after you leave or sometimes their stubbornness won't let them see it at all, but at the end of the day, God is in control and we work for Him. No boss in this world is worth our tears or our pain. Because God has everything we need, in a way no job could.
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