when you give the Universe an ultimatum

on unexpected life changes

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Photo by Kae Ng

“Dude, please tell me you’re in the clear.” The text from my coworker and good friend Camilo had come through at 6:24am, Friday morning. Because I worked from home on Fridays (thank you hybrid model) and because I strive not to allow notifications to steal the first few moments of my day¹, I saw it just shy of 8am.

Fuck! I thought, and dove for my work phone. I was able to access my work email, but immediately noticed error messages popping up to tell me I needed to re-verify for further access. Then I saw the email.

In December, while experiencing new levels of stress, burnout, and a general exhaustion that seemed to have seeped into every aspect of my life, I told my sister Kiana that if things didn’t change—if something major didn’t shift within the next 6 months—I’d move out of San Francisco.

One month later, I received a 2AM email, along with 11,999 other Google employees, informing me there was no longer a role for me there.

February would have marked two years at Google, where I joked to friends that I’m the only person we know who was “grandfathered” into a position. Fitbit was acquired in 2021 (after a lengthy acquisition process), which meant I became a Googler without having to do a single interview.

This April would have been four years at Fitbit, where I am an entirely different person than when I was first contacted by a recruiter for an editorial role on the blog team. I know I have grown in leaps and bounds, but not without periods of looming uncertainty, imposter syndrome, and workplace anxiety. I have also worked harder than I have in my entire career, in particular for a promotion that will now never come to be.

Did I feel a little jolt of frustration typing those last words? Of course. It’d be hard not to.

I was hesitant to include my ultimatum, this little deal I struck with the Universe, in this newsletter. After all, six months aren’t up yet. If month one has resulted in a cosmic reroute of these proportions, who knows where month six will lead me? (Not that I don’t actually find this exciting, I promise.)

And I normally try not to write about my work here, at least not in specifics. When I started grad school in 2018, and then as a creative in tech the spring of the following year, I made the choice to actively compartmentalize the seemingly disparate parts of my life—work, school, writing, and so on. I was already hugely burnt out and in March 2020, I faced an entirely different challenge than most: finishing my MFA program virtually while my workload soared. (I wrote about the feelings I had of being chained to my desk, and the trauma drive that pushed me through, in this post.)

2020 taught many of us that work/life balance was a sham. You can’t expect that attempting to segment your life like that will succeed. Things bleed over, to say the least.

It took me until now, though, to realize that the decision to try and do that in the first place was a kind of defense mechanism. Another trauma response.

I had wanted to keep this newsletter Strictly Magical, for the most part. Naming it as such is funny, but much of my writing has purposely expanded above and beyond the confines of “reality,” not only because I’ve treated art as both an escape and an anchor for most of my life. But truth be told, the reason I could comfortably afford my life in San Francisco—my nights drinking wine and working on my novel, alone in my apartment, living for the first time with no roommates—was because of that reality.

A woman of color; a witch and spiritually intuitive person; a poet, writer, and editrix; and a creative working in the tech industry, indeed for one of the Big Five companies. I am and was each and all of these things, all at once.

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As someone who’s experienced the shock of an unexpected layoff before, I don’t think there’s any “good” way to handle them. That said, Google had an opportunity here to handle them in a better way than other tech companies, which they chose not to take. The more human route being waylaid in favor of risk mitigation and a company’s bottom line is unsurprising, but still disappointing.

That first layoff resulted in me making my foray into the tech industry in the first place, though; I never would have considered it otherwise. It changed my life for the better in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. I’m convinced this experience will do the same, as long as I allow it to.

A case of the Nevers

I never write about work, preferring to keep my professional life and my writing life separate. I never thought I’d get into tech².

I never make ultimatums, either—except for when I do, they’re with the Universe.

Life doesn’t care for our Nevers—the haven’ts or won’ts. Our attempts to compartmentalize, our promises to keep things separate or strictly professional or even Strictly Magical³.

Though I know, as always, something else was at play for me here. (Truly, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think so.) I’m not at the whim of tech’s overlords, or at least no more so than anyone else. Perhaps I was only ever at the whim of this glorious and vast and sometimes genuinely surprising Universe. Yes, we’ll go with that.

And I still am, as are we all. Anything and everything is possible. I’m asking my guides to surprise me now.

I don’t know what my next steps are, but I do know I’ll take the time given to me to focus on myself. To prioritize my writing in a way I’ve been longing for. To go deep with this newsletter in a way I haven’t yet had the capacity to do. To finish my novel this year, finally. And to embrace my community, refusing to contract and return to self-isolation. To continue expanding in new and unforeseen ways.

Pretty damn thrilled for all of the above… and there’s so much more to come.

xx

Kimia

1. Spoiler alert: It’s not always successful.

2. Spent quite a few years side-eyeing tech, actually, and there are certainly aspects I remain critical of, the handling of current situation included!

3. I can just hear one of my favorite writing professors reminding me to weave the “real” in with the magical. “That’s why it’s magical realism, Kimia!”