The Redundancy That Gave Me My Life Back

I had been at the media production company in Cardiff for four years and had built a role around myself that was, in the way of roles you build rather than inherit, highly specific to what I could do and poorly transferable to the organisation's needs if those needs shifted significantly.

When they did shift - a change in the company's strategic direction that was commercial rather than personal - my particular configuration of skills and responsibilities was one that did not survive the restructuring. I was told on a Thursday. I was offered a fair redundancy package.

I drove home in the rain in a way that I suspect I will remember for a long time. The month that followed was the more dramatic of the two years and it was, I see now, primarily the grief of an unexpected ending rather than a genuine assessment of the situation I was actually in.

I had been unhappy at the company for the final eighteen months of my time there in ways I had been managing rather than addressing - a set of cultural changes that had made the environment less compatible with how I worked, a direction of travel that I had misgivings about and had not acted on.

I had been staying for reasons that were mostly inertial. The redundancy removed the inertia and created the exit I had not had the courage to make myself.

In the two months after the redundancy I did something I had not done since I was 22: I asked myself, without the constraint of a current role to build from, what I actually wanted to be doing.

The answer was clear enough and different enough from what I had been doing that I would not have reached it while employed. I took six months to pursue it deliberately before the savings required me to re-enter employment, and those six months produced a direction that I am still working in three years later and that fits in a way the previous role had not for a long time.

The redundancy was not a gift in the moment. It is one of the most significant things that has happened to my career and I am grateful for it.