Over the past ten years, I have been laid off four times. Four roles, four identities, four versions of myself undone.
The first was at a television station, where I worked as a reporter-producer. The newsroom was pure intensity: deadlines closing in, the small triumph of shaping a story under pressure. When my role was cut, I carried a bag of belongings out under the fluorescent lights, stunned by how quickly one’s sense of self can be severed. In a single morning, “reporter” slipped away from my name.
The second came in politics, where I worked as a press secretary. This was different. The position was co-terminus with the sitting government, and when the party lost an election, my role ended too. In theory, I knew this was inevitable. In practice, it still felt like loss. The morning after the results, I turned in my pass and walked out into a city that suddenly seemed unfamiliar. What stung wasn’t just the end of a job, but the abrupt disconnection from a team bound together by urgency and adrenaline. Even an ending that is “expected” unsettles when it arrives.
The third was as a brand marketing advisor. For a time, I believed I had finally found stability. I liked shaping narratives, guiding campaigns, feeling as though I was building something lasting. Then came the familiar meeting, the language of “restructuring,” and the quiet walk back to my desk. I stared at the hollow décor of “culture,” and realized how easily stability dissolves into silence.
Now, in 2025, I’ve been laid off for the fourth time, from my role as a media relations person. This was work I valued deeply—precise, necessary, disciplined. And yet, again, the same words: We’re letting you go.
Four layoffs in ten years. A decade of working, rebuilding, and being undone.
Levinas wrote that ethics begins not in systems or principles but in the encounter with the face of the Other. To meet another person—to be looked at, addressed, held in relation—is to feel the weight of responsibility. The face interrupts our solitude; it says: You are responsible for me. You cannot ignore me.
Each layoff has exposed me to this truth. What I remember most are not the corporate scripts or HR explanations, but the faces and gestures of colleagues who refused to let me vanish into abstraction. After the newsroom, drinks shared in sympathy. After politics, a note from a journalist I once sparred with, acknowledging respect. After marketing, quiet messages from teammates reminding me I was more than my role. And now, again, texts and calls: “You’ll bounce back. You always do.”
These gestures matter. They are Levinas’s ethics lived out in miniature—small affirmations that I am seen. Each one is a refusal of invisibility. And yet, they carry paradox. Every “you’ll bounce back” fills me with gratitude and also with fatigue. Gratitude, because encouragement is care. Fatigue, because resilience is not a bottomless well. Each time I rebuild, it costs more.
Levinas insists that responsibility to the Other is infinite. The Other’s presence makes a demand that cannot be fully met, a call that exceeds our strength. To me, this explains the complexity of encouragement. When colleagues say “you’ll be fine,” they are responding to that infinite call, offering what they can, even if their words feel both comforting and heavy. They cannot erase the loss, but they remind me that I am not alone in it.
And what about my responsibility? Levinas reminds us that ethics is asymmetrical: the Other calls us first. My task, then, is to accept the gift of care, honestly. That means not pretending to be endlessly resilient. To let myself say: I am tired. To acknowledge that resilience has limits, that bouncing back is never effortless.
This, I think, is a corrective to our culture of professional resilience. We live in a world that glorifies reinvention, agility, the ability to start over without missing a beat. But beneath that performance is a truth we rarely admit: instability erodes us. To begin again four times in a decade is not heroic. It is exhausting.
What if resilience included the right to pause? To grieve what is lost before leaping forward? Levinas describes the encounter with the Other as an interruption — a shattering of our self-enclosed narrative. Perhaps resilience also requires interruption: resisting the demand to “bounce back” immediately, letting ourselves linger in the pause long enough to feel both fatigue and gratitude.
Over the last ten years, I have been a journalist, a political staffer, a brand advisor, and a media specialist. Each role has shaped me, but none defines me fully. Four layoffs have stripped away titles, but not the faces of those who reminded me that I still matter.
So for now, I am not rushing to bounce back. I am allowing the pause to be part of the story. I am choosing to sit with the fatigue, the gratitude, and the interruptions that come when others look at me and say, You are seen.
Maybe the real resilience is not in the bounce, but in the pause—in admitting weariness, receiving care, and discovering meaning in the infinite responsibility we bear toward one another.
Renato Gandia 