The Job I Got Fired From Redirected My Life

I was 25 and eighteen months into a job that I had taken because it sounded impressive and that I had stayed in because leaving felt like giving up. The role was a content strategy position at a well-funded startup, and for the first few months I had thrown myself into it with genuine energy.

Then, gradually, I started to understand that the company's culture rewarded a specific style of working - fast, loud, credit-claiming, politically savvy in a way that I was neither good at nor interested in becoming. I kept my head down and did my work.

What I did not do was manage perceptions, build alliances, or make myself visible in the ways that the environment clearly valued. I was doing good work in a context that had almost no mechanism for recognising quiet, quality work. I was warned once, vaguely, about needing to show more initiative.

I interpreted this to mean working harder on the actual output. It meant something else entirely. The firing came on a Friday afternoon and was handled with the minimum required professionalism.

I was told it was a restructure, which may have been partly true, but I knew enough to understand that people who had built the right relationships were not being restructured. I drove home and sat in my car in the parking garage for about twenty minutes before going upstairs.

The first two weeks were difficult in a way I had not expected - not the financial stress, though that was real, but the shame, which attached itself to every interaction. I had been fired. The sentence felt enormous.

What came after was a period of genuine reflection, partly because I had time I had not had before and partly because the crisis had stripped away some of the defensive self-assurance that had been preventing honest examination.

I looked clearly at what I had enjoyed about the role and what I had not, at the type of environment I actually thrived in versus the type I had been trying to perform well in.

I applied for very different kinds of roles - smaller companies, less politically complex cultures, places where the value system was more compatible with how I actually worked. I found one within three months. The fit was immediately and palpably different.

Within a year I had been promoted and was doing some of the best work of my career. The company I was fired from closed two years later. I do not say that with satisfaction - many good people lost jobs.

I say it because it clarified that the institution had not been a stable bet in the first place. The firing was not the verdict on my worth. It was information about the fit. Those are different things, and it took me longer than I would like to admit to separate them.