When I picked up my phone last Tuesday morning, two messages caught my attention. One from a colleague said she’d been laid off, and another from HR asked me to check my personal email. My throat tightened.
I found myself among the 14,000 corporate employees laid off by Amazon. I had just celebrated my one-year anniversary as a senior social media manager at Amazon Ads and it was exactly a week before my birthday. Talk about timing.
My immediate reaction was disbelief. Was I still dreaming? Was the email spam? Even though there were rumors about layoffs the day before, everything had seemed relatively normal. I was busy preparing for an event in mid-November. I guess I won’t be going to that one.
I called my partner and parents to tell them the news. They were supportive but also recognized the weight of the situation more than I could in the moment. It still hadn’t hit me. Where do you even start when there are hundreds of feelings?
My job at Amazon had been somewhat of a dream role, a signal to myself that I had “made it” in the corporate world.
