Monday, January 19, 2026

Relearning My Identity — Part Two



I sat down on my couch one morning, opening my tablet to start my pre-work ritual of Wordle, study, and meditation. I was working from home on a day usually devoid of meetings. Before starting, I quickly checked the calendar on my phone to make sure I didn’t have any unexpected early meetings.

Huh. I had a 15-minute meeting scheduled for 10:10 AM. That was odd. I read more. It talked about changes at the company. I was affected.

Shit.

Again?
 
During the meeting I got confirmation that I (along with many others) was being laid off, effective immediately. I suddenly found myself with no job and all the time in the world, for the second time in two years. The first time this happened I was unprepared for the disruption, ultimately leading to a long journey of reflection and learning.

This time, I was in a much better position. I had done the work to know what is important to me and I immediately put those learnings to use. For me, that included checking on colleagues who had been laid off, doing a lot of cooking, and ramping up my running.

This post covers how I built a sense of identity that was strong enough to take a layoff in stride. The process included framing questions, brainstorming on answers, organizing the ideas, and synthesizing something useful for myself. In the end, I had built a personal guide for living my life.

This is the concluding post in a series on job loss and identity and a follow up to Relearning My Identity – Step One.

Three people facing the camera and smiling. they are outside, higher than the surrounding area, with trees behind them in the distance. The leaves are mostly off the trees and the people are wearing jackets.
On a hike with a colleague and my wife a few weeks after being laid off. 
 

Continuing the Journey

In Relearning My Identity – Step One I started a journey of self-redefinition. In that post I listed four draft pillars of my identity:
  1. I make things that other people use.
  2. I make the people around me better.
  3. I’m a learner who pulls together disparate ideas to create cool things.
  4. I write in service of the first three goals.
That list was a work in progress as I began making sense of my world after losing my job. It quickly became clear that the list is very focused on my professional life and misses important aspects of my non-work life. I have been thinking about that ever since. I have tried to expand and generalize my self-definition to include all parts of myself. I am happy to say that those four pillars still ring true to me and are captured in my updated sense of self, but they are no longer the top-level themes.

Brainstorming

I thought and brainstormed on the topic for five months, even as I started a new job. Along the way, I had false starts, backtracked, and reframed my effort. I shifted from trying to answer the vague question “Who am I?” to attempting a focused task: building a guide for living my life aligned with my values. The guide should answer the question of who I am, but it should also help me make decisions and accomplish my goals.

I focused my brainstorming around building that guide. I tried to capture everything about myself, whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. Then I made a value judgment about each of those aspects of myself: Was this something I wanted to embrace? Was this something I was willing to change? Was each framing or description helpful to me?

That last question was particularly interesting to me. After some reflection, I found that a number of the details I had captured were not useful to me. For example, I’m smart. I’ve known that I am smart since I was a small child. But smart is usually defined in comparison to other people. I don’t want my identity threatened when I interact with people who are smarter than me. I often work with people who are smarter than me and I want to continue doing so, because I learn and accomplish so much when I do!

For each not-useful description, I tried to find related descriptions that were useful. For instance, part of what makes me smart is my love of learning. My love of learning will never be threatened by someone else’s love of learning. My love of learning is a helpful self-description.

Explaining It All

My collected brainstormings had a lot of great things, but they didn’t add up to a guide for my life. It was now clear that the four draft themes from earlier were not that guide, either, as they missed many important parts of my life. I still needed some short collection of top-level themes to organize everything into a guide.

The correct top-level themes did not just jump out at me. To find the correct themes, I committed to making several drafts, with each iteration as different as possible from the previous. I then reviewed my attempts, creating a final list of themes that felt right to me. Those final themes, combined with all the supporting details arranged underneath them, is my life guide.

My Themes

I finished with four top-level themes:
  1. I search for and find awe and wonder in this world.
  2. I take care of myself and others.
  3. I create things of use for myself and others.
  4. I deeply enjoy myself.

Every time I read that list, I get a warm feeling. There is much more detail behind each of these four, but they capture the biggest ideals and give me something to both talk and think about.

You might notice that those four do not say “I am an engineer” or say anything explicitly about my profession. I could retire tomorrow and still satisfy all of them. Still, my professional identity fits comfortably within them, as do my original four themes.

For instance, one reason I became an engineer was because I loved (and still love) to understand how things work and how I could build them. I experience a sense of awe and wonder when learning how things are built. Being an engineer is an inherently creative endeavor, constantly creating new things. Working as a staff engineer, a large amount of my time is focused on mentoring junior colleagues and helping build a strong team culture. In other words, I’m taking care of others and myself. Finally, I regularly find opportunities to deeply enjoy myself in the role.
 
That said, each of those categories is much wider than just my professional experiences. It includes a lot of art, food, gratitude, relationships, community, learning, exercise, hobbies, volunteering, and more.

Living My Identity

I applied these learnings the day I was laid off and every day since. I started by checking in on my colleagues to see how they were doing and how I might help them. That helped me take care of others, and in the process, take care of myself. I did a lot of cooking. Cooking helped satisfy my need to create, and also allowed me to take care of my family. I ramped up my running to take care of my body during this time of stress. I also got out on the trail, filling myself with awe and wonder, and deeply enjoying myself. In fact, I took my first post-layoff hike with my wife an hour after being laid off. And I’ve kept writing, which may hit all four of my themes.

I am very proud of and happy with my updated sense of identity. It has taken a large investment of time, but it has already returned value to me. I regularly review my themes and supporting details, reflecting on my identity, making sure I am living according to my values. Like everyone else, I am continually evolving. I will make sure to regularly update my sense of identity to match that evolution.

I would encourage you to spend some time thinking about what makes you who you are. If you do, I would love to hear about what you learn along the way. I’ve included some additional resources below to help you on your way.

Thank you to Heather Beasley Doyle for her feedback on this post and her support through this entire period of my life. Heather is a gifted writer. You should check out her homepage and her writing. 

Resources


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