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When I started out to write my feelings down, I thought I would do this in 5 parts, one for each stage of the classic stages of grief. In addtion to those in the title, the other two are depression and acceptance.

What I realized was that I actually had 2 distinct stages where I was feeling emotions in a cyclical manner. I also noted one additional emotion that really cropped up: fear. I will cover the remaining three in part 2, but I want to cover the starting phase here in part 1.

For me, there was a process that I went through that included all of these emotions, but definitely not always in this order.

Bargaining

It started almost immediately. When I got my call, it felt like a bus had hit me. I was in the exit area of the Villans show (Called Unfairly Ever After at Hollywood Studios) on a short vacation. When I saw the call come in I left just before the show started, hoping to hop back in and finish seeing fake villains. It didn’t happen as I was on the phone for a bit. Immediately I am thinking (and one time asking audibly) “how can I make this not happen?” Of course, once that ball has started rolling, it is really over.

They didn’t just compile a list that afternoon, they have made the plans over time and knew what comes next. But that is not what you think in the moment. Surely they made a mistake.

For much of the next week as I finished my vacation and drove home, I could almost make myself believe that anytime now there would be a call saying “we made a mistake.” Some of this is really close to denial, but to me, it was really just me trying to bargain for my life. I will do whatever it takes.

You have to know that plans are bigger than you or any people affected and these plans are in motion like a freight train filled with coal coming down a mountain. They may have been in motion for months, you won’t know, and will probably never know. Later in the process you will (hopefully) figure this out, but for now, pure bargaining.

Still, it did make me feel better to have those thoughts to start with. The feeling of being a failure is powerful, and the bargaining made me feel less so. As you stop denying it is happening, you turn turn dealing with it. And dealing with it comes to the next section.

Anger

This one is simple enough. You had a job, now it is gone. Like, love, or hate that job, that company, those people…it was your source of income and it is gone. The bargaining and pleading didn’t work (even if you may eventually come back to it at least mentally). And now you are just a wee bit mad about it.

Adding to that is this realization that there is going to be copious amounts of paperwork, resume catching up, job searching, etc., etc., And since your days are pretty open for a while, you have this time to seethe. Unlike most job changes, you don’t have a place to go yet. (This anger is quite close to the fear that seeped in the next blog, but right now you aren’t so much afraid of the future as mad about now and what the process will be like.)

So yeah, when it starts to sink in, you get a bit angry. A few primal screams alone in your car definitely help, but outwardly you need to keep a stiff upper lip and be professional. Talking to someone about all of this is definitely helpful to get you past the anger, but it will come back again occasionally whether you like it or not.

Being professional is especially hard (but essential) at this point when you are a writer/social media user, but not putting out your anger to the world in the heat of the moment is a super power you have to muster up for the good of your future. This feeling will pass, and you can deal with it in reasonable ways. Me, I pulled a lot of stickers off a lot of my gear, and I probably will one day actually want some of those stickers back.)

Denial

Denial is kind of weird. It wasn’t like I ever thought “this never happened, everything is normal” so much as my brain just kept doing the work (and still does sometimes a month past). My situation is sort of different than a lot of people because I was supposed to put myself, my personality, more or less “me” into the output of my work. I had really gotten deep into the work and had been planning big changes. The work involved a lot of things, but a large part of it was basically a better funded version of my life as a Microsoft MVP for 19 years.

So my mind denied it over and over and kept thinking “I need to prepare for the podcast” or “I need to fix this article”. Sometimes it is a dream that I wake up from thinking I need to do some work. It is part of why I decided to go ahead and immediately create a new blog so I could write https://drsql.link. This is also why I kept the idea of an editorial that I would write as weekly as possible. So I could deal with all of life’s work lessons in a very professional, yet true to myself, manner.

The Bargaining, Anger, Denial Loop

I put these all in the same blog because I find myself doing this over and over for weeks. I tend to have discussions with myself. One sided of course, as no one is talking back in my head or anything, but they are still full blown discussions. (In fact, most of my editorial content like this is just these discussions i Write down with some editing.)

These went a lot like this:

• “Isn’t there some way I could go back? I will…” I knew it wasn’t possible, but that doesn’t matter as you start the process, or are coming back from a bout of denial.
• “I am so mad at…” Generally there was two things I was mad at. Myself for not doing something to save myself, and the concept of the company I was laid off from. Even if I knew it was for the better in some ways (which I did in the first case at least), it doesn’t make you less mad when it is all still fresh.
• “Maybe this is all a dream” Yeah, I knew it wasn’t but for some reason this sort of thinking included doing my job in my head and was mildly comforting.

I just did these things mentally for weeks, a little bit at a time and there was no way to make myself stop. This basically happened both times I have been a part of a layoff to some extent. The whole getting over the grief has been a weird, semi-irrational state of mind that just keeps looping over and over.

And then…

It just sort of sunk in, and this loop of irrational, almost protective emotions starts to fade. In part 2, I will talk about the way I started to feel a bit normal, but also, this is when it gets real. Oh yeah, and normal doesn’t always feel good… just normal.