Losing the Job I Loved Showed Me What I Had Built My Identity On

I had joined the logistics technology company in Fukuoka when it had forty employees and I was 25. I had grown with it through three funding rounds, multiple pivots, a year of near-closure that we somehow navigated, and the eventual scaling into a company that was, by the time I was 29, genuinely significant in its sector.

I had grown with it so completely that the company and I had developed a reciprocal relationship that was, in retrospect, more like a marriage than an employment contract. My social life was built substantially around colleagues. My sense of professional worth was measured almost entirely by the company's trajectory.

I had turned down two competitive offers in the previous two years without much deliberation because leaving had not felt like a real option - not because of financial incentive but because the idea of not being part of this particular thing was genuinely unimaginable to me.

The redundancy came from a strategic restructuring that was, as these things usually are, sudden only in its announcement. The role that had been built around my specific capabilities was being reorganised out of existence as the company moved into a phase that required different skills than the ones the founding period had needed.

My manager told me with genuine difficulty. The severance was fair. None of this made the following months less destabilising. I had two main things to work through simultaneously. The first was the ordinary difficulty of job searching from a position of unexpectedness rather than readiness.

The second, and harder, was the discovery that I had no particularly stable sense of professional identity independent of the company. When people at social events asked what I did and I no longer had that answer, I experienced a disorientation that was more revealing than I wanted it to be.

I found myself describing what I used to do and the company as it had been with a protectiveness that I eventually recognised as grief - specifically the grief of something that had been my primary sense of purpose and was now in the past tense.

At 31, I am at a different company that I find meaningful and in which I have made deliberate decisions not to replicate the pattern. I contribute fully and I also exist outside of it. The lesson arrived at significant cost. I would recommend finding it some other way.