I hope you get fired from your cushy corporate job.

Not because I want you to suffer.

I am saying it because it happened to me, and looking back now, it may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.

At the time, it broke me.

But sometimes the thing that breaks the version of you that is no longer working is the same thing that makes room for the version of you that was always trying to emerge.

Let me explain.

Finding the Slow Lane

For 17 years, I worked for the same employer.

When I first started there, I remember being painfully bored. I had come from a high-pressure consulting environment where the deadlines were intense, the pace was relentless, and people were practically sleeping at their desks just to get the work done. A few developers even had pillows at their workstations so they could catch a quick nap late at night before getting back to it.

That was the world I came from.

Then I moved into a quasi-government organization where everything moved slower.

Much slower.

A task that would have been handled in a few days in my old life could somehow stretch into weeks. There was no constant fire. No adrenaline spike every morning. No one asking you to sacrifice your entire nervous system to hit a deadline.

At first, I could not stand it.

After the first month, I seriously considered quitting. I was a high achiever. I was used to pressure. I was used to being in motion. A part of me believed I needed the chaos in order to feel useful.

But I was also entering a different stage of life. I had recently gotten married. I was starting to think about having kids. Maybe, for the first time, the slower pace was exactly what I needed.

This company talked a lot about work-life balance, which was a concept I honestly did not understand at first.

Over time, though, something shifted.

The old consulting version of me, high throttle, high adrenaline, high cortisol, slowly started to fade. I would shut off my computer at 4 p.m. and not think about work again until 8 a.m. the next morning.

And somehow, even operating below my full capacity, I still achieved exceptional results.

Of the 17 years I worked there, I was considered a key contributor, basically in the top tier of the organization, for 11 of them.

I rose through the ranks. I took on more responsibility. I built a strong reputation. I learned new skills. I was challenged. I was mostly content.

Until I wasn't.

The Cracks Begin to Show

The higher I moved, the more I saw things I had been sheltered from earlier in my career.

The politics. The agendas. The need to toe the company line. The pressure to be agreeable. The subtle art of laughing at jokes that were not funny. The performance of pretending to care about things that did not matter. The quiet expectation that you shrink parts of yourself to fit into a role.

At first, I played along.

I told myself this was just part of leadership. Part of growing up. Part of being responsible. Part of getting closer to the pension. Part of doing what needed to be done for my family.

But slowly, something inside me started to revolt.

I hated playing small.

I hated pretending.

I hated being shaped into a corporate version of myself that I did not even recognize.

And eventually, I could not fake it anymore.

It started showing up in my work. It started showing up in my energy. It started showing up in my body, my mind, and my spirit.

I had spent years becoming someone the company could reward, but somewhere along the way, I had abandoned too much of myself.

That eventually caught up to me.

I began struggling deeply with my mental health, to the point where I had to take a leave from work.

That was the beginning of the end of my career there.

I took three months away. I went to counselling every week. I tried medication. I meditated. I journaled. I exercised. I did everything I could to return to whatever "normal" was supposed to be.

But deep down, I knew something had cracked.

When I returned to work, I put on the smile. I played the part. I tried to convince everyone, including myself, that I was okay.

But I wasn't.

On the outside, I looked like I was functioning.

On the inside, I felt completely disconnected from myself.

The Day Everything Ended

And then it happened.

I was preparing for a JAD session I was running later that day. I had worked until midnight the night before getting ready for it. When my boss showed up for our weekly check-in, I asked if we could repurpose the time so I could run a few things by him before I facilitated.

He said no.

Then he said he wanted to invite someone from HR to join us.

That is when I knew.

They dropped the bomb.

After 17 years, it was over.

And the strangest part was that I still had a room full of people waiting for me to walk in and lead a session I would never get to run.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement.

But shock was only the beginning.

Losing the Identity I Built My Life Around

I fell apart.

Not just because I lost the job, but because I lost the identity I had built around it.

For most of my adult life, I had carried around all these labels like they were me.

Project Manager. Business Analyst. Leader. PMP. Father. Husband. Assistant Coach.

The job was not my whole identity, but it was a huge part of it. And when it disappeared, it felt like half of me disappeared with it.

I was shattered.

I continued counselling because I genuinely did not know which way to turn. Friends I had counted on stopped calling. Family did not really know how to help. My support system felt like it had vanished right when I needed it most.

Everything I had known professionally for more than 20 years was suddenly gone.

Thankfully, I received a severance package, and my spouse at the time was supportive of me taking time to heal. That gave me something I will always be grateful for.

Time.

Time without immediate financial pressure.

And that time became both a gift and a confrontation.

Because when you are no longer busy, you have nowhere left to hide.

I had to sit with everything.

The shame. The anger. The confusion. The grief. The fear. The embarrassment. The loss of identity.

And the quiet question that kept repeating in my head:

Who am I now?

I cried. I meditated. I journaled. I exercised. I prayed.

I asked God why this had happened to me. I asked what I had done to deserve that much pain. I could not understand how I had gone from being a top performer to being fired.

For a long time, I could not even bring myself to say it out loud.

I would tell people I chose to leave.

Because being fired carried so much shame for me.

That summer, I spent more time with my kids than I had in years. And for the first time in a long time, I was actually present.

No competing priorities.

No half-attention.

No checking emails in my head while pretending to listen.

Just there.

They were too young to fully understand what I was going through. They could not relate to the shame or the loss or the questions I was carrying. But their laughter healed something in me that words could not reach. Their hugs on the hard days meant more than they will ever know.

They were the light.

And so was my dog, who never needed me to explain anything. He just knew when to sit beside me.

What Looks Like a Disaster Can Be a Turning Point

Somewhere in those quiet months, I started to understand something I had heard before but never truly lived.

The same event can look like a disaster or a turning point depending on where you are standing.

When you are in it, all you can see is the loss.

But later, with enough distance, you start to see the hidden mercy.

What felt like rejection was protection.

What felt like an ending was actually a rerouting.

What felt like punishment was life refusing to let me stay somewhere I no longer belonged.

I know that might sound abstract if you are in the middle of your own collapse right now. It would have sounded abstract to me too.

When you are crawling through it, you cannot see the purpose. You cannot see the blessing. You cannot see the new life being built in the background.

All you can feel is what has been taken.

But time has a way of revealing what pain hides.

Looking back now, I can see things I could not see then.

I was getting passed over for opportunities. I was being slowly beaten down. I was no longer seen as the star employee. I was trying to survive in a place where I no longer fit.

And because I did not have the courage to leave on my own, life removed me.

God removed me.

The universe removed me.

Whatever language you want to use, I know this now:

I was not supposed to be there anymore.

The Great Purge

And it was not just the job that disappeared.

People disappeared too.

Relationships shifted. Old connections fell away. Things I thought were permanent revealed themselves to be temporary.

At the time, that felt like abandonment.

Now, I see it as clearing.

You cannot begin a new life while clinging to every piece of your old one.

Anything that no longer fit had to go.

It was the great purge.

Space was being created.

Space for healing.

Space for truth.

Space for a version of me that had been buried under titles, responsibilities, expectations, and other people's approval.

Becoming Myself Again

That old version of me is gone now.

The people pleaser is gone.

The man who laughed at jokes he did not find funny is gone.

The man who needed approval from people he did not even respect is gone.

The man who kept shrinking himself to fit into rooms he had outgrown is gone.

I no longer play small.

I make my own rules now.

I run my business the way I want to run it. I speak the way I want to speak. I create the way I want to create.

I get to live authentically.

I get to be myself.

And I no longer care about being liked by everyone, because that is impossible anyway. More importantly, it is a complete waste of your life.

I have become the strongest, most resilient, most grounded version of myself because the life I was clinging to collapsed.

That collapse was not the end of me.

It was the beginning of me.

If You Are in the Middle of Your Own Collapse

So when I say I hope you get fired from your cushy corporate job, I do not mean I hope you suffer.

I mean I hope life loves you enough to remove you from the places where you keep betraying yourself.

I hope whatever is false in your life falls apart.

I hope the version of you that is performing, pretending, pleasing, and shrinking finally gets interrupted.

I hope you are given the chance to remember who you actually are.

Some people will read this and completely miss the point.

That is fine.

I did not write this for them.

I wrote it for the person who is in the middle of their own collapse right now.

The person who lost the job.

The person whose relationship ended.

The person whose identity fell apart.

The person who is quietly wondering if life will ever feel beautiful again.

I promise you, there is beauty on the other side.

You may not see it yet.

I did not see it either.

But sometimes life has to strip away everything that is not truly you so you can finally become who you were meant to be.

The collapse is not the end.

It might be the beginning of the most honest life you have ever lived.

With love,
Rick