How to Survive a Layoff

Based on my personal experiences

Like many across the Bay Area, I was laid off early in 2023. I was given no severance or warning beyond a coworker in an earlier time zone texting me that she had been laid off that morning.

This was the first time in my life I had been terminated from a job. I wasn’t fired from the ice cream stand when I accidentally contaminated the milkshake mix after confusing its bucket with the trash bucket. I wasn’t let go from my school district’s grounds crew for hiding in the softball dugout and playing Clash of Clans on my phone whenever I finished the landscaping duties assigned to me. I wasn’t even fired from my supposedly prestigious consulting internship when it became very apparent that they had no real work for me to do.

Being terminated from those jobs would have been much easier for one simple reason: I did not yet live fully independently. Staring down the barrel of Bay Area rent prices, the walls felt as though they were closing in on me very tightly and very quickly these past two …