Losing your identity after a layoff hits differently than you expect. The silence after my second layoff surprised me. I expected to worry about my résumé or my next interview. Instead, I found myself wondering something far more unsettling: Who needed me now?
For more than thirty years, my calendar had been full of meetings, decisions, and people depending on me. My work gave structure to my days and shaped how I saw myself. Then, almost overnight, it was gone.
What Losing Your Identity After a Layoff Actually Feels Like
Careers rarely become our identity all at once. It happens quietly. We become the person colleagues call when a problem needs solving. We introduce ourselves by our title without realizing it. The work begins to reflect back a version of ourselves that feels permanent.
Until it doesn’t.
Being laid off twice in two years forced me to confront a question I had managed to avoid throughout my career. If I wasn’t a COO, if I wasn’t leading an organization, who was I?
Everything Changed at Once
The layoffs were only part of the story.
Around the same time, my husband received military orders that took us from Washington, DC, to Twentynine Palms, California. Our youngest left for college. The routines, relationships, and communities that had quietly shaped everyday life disappeared almost at once.
Twentynine Palms is beautiful in a stark, unforgettable way. The sky stretches forever. The desert has a stillness that makes you notice your own thoughts.
It also made me realize how much of belonging comes from seeing the same people over and over again. My favorite coffee shop was gone. My hiking group was gone. Friends were three time zones away.
For the first time, I understood that I hadn’t simply lost a job. I had lost the invisible infrastructure that had held my life together.
One Conversation Changed My Thinking
As I explored entrepreneurship, I spoke with a woman who had also worked at IBM years earlier. I admitted that what frightened me most was figuring out how to find clients.
She helped me see that entrepreneurship was different then the way we found clients when I worked at IBM as a government contractor writing huge proposals. She reminded me that referrals, partnerships, and relationships are how businesses grow because someone remembers your work, trusts your judgment, and introduces you to someone else. I left realizing I had been asking the wrong question.
The Question I Was Really Trying to Answer
That conversation made me look back over my career differently. I hadn’t spent three decades building a title.I had spent three decades building trust. I had learned how to solve difficult problems, navigate uncertainty, lead through change, and build relationships that endured long after projects ended. None of those things disappeared when my employer did.
The layoffs felt personal because I had confused where I worked with what I had built. What I had actually built was a reputation, judgment, and a network of people who knew how I worked. Those belonged to me.
That realization became the foundation for starting my own company, Better Outside Together. I wasn’t starting from nothing. I was building from everything my career had already given me.
Many women reach midlife just as the identities they’ve relied on begin to shift. Careers end. Children leave home. Parents need care. Communities change. The question isn’t simply, “What’s next?” It’s, “Who am I when the roles that introduced me begin to fall away?”
What You Built Was Always Yours
For me, the answer wasn’t another title. It was the person my career had been shaping all along. The judgment I’d earned. The relationships I’d built. The ability to solve problems, bring people together, and create something people wanted to be part of. Those things were never owned by an employer. They were mine.
Once I understood that, I stopped trying to replace the job I’d lost and started building something that reflected who I had become.
I founded Better Outside Together. On one side of the business, I bring women together in nature to build connection, confidence, and community. On the other, I work with leadership teams, using the outdoors to help colleagues build trust, communicate more openly, and collaborate more effectively.
At first glance, those might seem like two different businesses. I don’t think they are.
They’re both built on the same belief: people thrive when someone creates the conditions for genuine connection.
Looking back, I wasn’t starting over.
I was doing the work I’d always been meant to do. I had simply found a different place to do it.
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