One battle after another: working corporate

A soft corporate guillotine

The beautiful blonde project manager turned COO offered me coffee once I got to the conference room, asked politely about family and holiday plans, like we were easing into something ordinary. He was going to the Caribbean.

I corrected my posture on the chair, and chippered away about plans to go skiing and my moms health issues, the year had be rough but also luckily we endured it.

Then the air turned crisp, my vision narrowed, and I felt sudden tunnel vision. Was he saying something I’d heard before, somewhere else, in another life?

He said the sentence slowly, as if reading a weather report, not rearranging my entire life: “We have decided to go in another direction and eliminated your position.”

There it was. A soft corporate guillotine.

No warning, no storm clouds on the horizon, not even that faint ozone smell you get before lightning strikes.
Just donzo.

The absurd part is that I didn’t even love the job. I didn’t cling to it, didn’t dream of climbing its ladder, didn’t polish any metaphorical brass plaques.

But it held me in a strange, quiet pause. A suspension. A place where I could rest my tired ambition while I figured out who I was becoming next.

The company was a room with the lights dimmed, the volume low, the expectations manageable. I was comfortable in that strange way certain liminal spaces are comfortable, like staring at your packed bags you haven’t yet decided to open.

I told myself I’d leave next year. Next year, I’d find something sharper, truer, more aligned. Next year I’d stop compromising. Next year I’d remember what hunger felt like. Life got in the way and kept me in suspension.

My personal hell was one battle after another. I felt like DiCaprio in a movie where survival never quite turns into relief. How will I rebuild after this?

And then suddenly next year became now. Not through courage, but because someone in a quiet back office drew a line through my name.

I feel odd, like my body hasn’t caught up to the plot twist in my own story. Numb from crying, not because the job deserved my sadness, but because endings, even the necessary ones, sting hard.

I’m embarrassed by how humiliated I felt walking back into my office afterward—
the forced calm, the trying-not-to-look-like-you-were-just-erased. Like you’re supposed to glide through your own undoing with poise. Ridiculous.

But here’s the secret I’m whispering to myself tonight, the thing I’m trying to believe even as my stomach flips: sometimes the door you didn’t dare to close gets slammed for you.

When dust settles, and the quiet washes over me, the window of opportunity now opened for me. What will come next? I don’t know, but I have to fiercely believe it is better than the past.

I have known that the place was not meant for me the moment I set foot there, however I went with it because I knew I needed to calm my nervous system from the corporate ladder, needed to save, and just wanted an easy job.

Since that day, the project manager has made a practice of avoiding me. Our eyes catch briefly, then his retreat. There’s shame in it. I’ve learned to use my silence deliberately now—an edge, a message, a line drawn cleanly behind me.

In the upcoming essays, I’ll write about my eerie time in that Villa by the lake—a financial hub humming beneath its surface, run by an Israeli, arguably mafia-adjacent, full of odd transactions and whispered political favours.

Obviously, this is fiction. Any resemblance to real life is your own projection.
LOL.