The Exit I Didn’t Choose
Being fired without cause can rearrange your reality—this is what it taught me about steadiness and self-trust.
An Art of Drinking Water reflection · 5 minute read
Being fired without cause rearranges something inside you.
Not loudly.
Not all at once.
It settles in quietly—
in the way you reread the email looking for meaning that isn’t there,
in the way your body tenses when you say the word terminated out loud,
in the way shame shows up even when you’ve done nothing wrong.
There was no warning.
No explanation that matched the weight of the outcome.
Just a decision made elsewhere, handed to me like a closed door I was expected to accept gracefully.
I kept asking myself what I missed.
A tone?
A moment?
A rule I didn’t know I was breaking?
Being fired without cause doesn’t just end a job. It unsettles your sense of reality.
You start to question your instincts.
Your competence.
Your memory of how things actually were.
People say, It’s not personal.
But work is personal.
It’s where we spend our days, our energy, our care.
Losing it abruptly feels like being erased from a story you were still writing.
In the days that followed, I noticed how quickly my confidence leaked out of me.
How easily I internalized a decision that had nothing to do with my worth.
How silence from former colleagues felt heavier than the termination itself.
And then came the pressure to move on.
To update the résumé.
To sound positive in interviews.
To frame the loss as a learning experience before I’d even had time to grieve it.
But loss doesn’t respond well to spin.
I needed space to feel what was real.
The anger that flared unexpectedly.
The fear that whispered What if this happens again?
The relief I didn’t want to admit—because some part of me had been struggling long before the ending arrived.
That’s the part we don’t talk about.
Sometimes being fired hurts because it’s unjust.
And sometimes it hurts because it confirms what your body already knew—that the environment wasn’t safe, or sustainable, or aligned.
Both can be true.
Moving on to a new job didn’t feel like progress at first.
It felt like exposure.
Walking into interviews with a story I didn’t fully understand yet.
Trying to trust systems that had already shown me how fragile they could be.
I learned to speak honestly without oversharing.
To name the transition without apologizing for it.
To let the discomfort exist without rushing to rebrand it as gratitude.
Water taught me something here.
Water doesn’t cling to a container that cracks it.
It doesn’t argue with the break.
It moves on—not because it failed, but because it must.
Eventually, something shifted.
Not confidence exactly—but steadiness.
The understanding that being let go was not a verdict on my ability to contribute.
That losing a job does not mean losing direction.
That I could carry the experience without letting it define me.
Now, when I think about that exit, I don’t try to make it meaningful.
I let it be what it was.
An ending I didn’t choose.
A rupture that asked me to rebuild trust—slowly, carefully, with myself first.
And when I step into new work now, I do it differently.
I listen to my body.
I watch how decisions are made.
I pay attention to whether my presence is valued—or merely convenient.
Because moving on isn’t about pretending it didn’t hurt.
It’s about choosing environments that don’t require you to doubt your worth to belong.
Like water finding a new path after the dam breaks—
not because it was weak,
but because it was always meant to keep flowing.