‘It was heartbreaking’: Why getting fired can wreak havoc on your self-esteem
Original article posted on: Thestar.ca
Written by: Sarah Laing
“It was pretty profound. I really took it as this referendum on who I am as a person, what my contributions are,” said Mukhopadhyay, speaking from her home in New York. “That was a really hard thing to face.”
Mukhopadhyay, who went on to become the executive editor of Teen Vogue, is now an author and recounts being fired in detail in her fantastic new book “The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning,” which aims to reimagine our relationship with work.
She writes about the lead up: Her first-ever bad performance review, which left her sobbing on a park bench in the middle of the workday; the sense that she was “spinning” in a role she wasn’t fully prepared for or supported in; and the “shame around not doing the right thing, even though I didn’t have a clear sense of what I was supposed to be doing.”
Her employer framed it as a “restructuring,” but at the time it felt clear to Mukhopadhyay that she’d been fired because she simply wasn’t up to the job.
This came after years of “grinding,” and “faking it till you make it” as she tried to break into media, coming up as a blogger and juggling other jobs until she was hired into this senior role. “I was burned out and working so hard, so I was not especially well-positioned to deal with the layoff,” she said. “This job was an all or nothing for me, so I would have done anything to keep it. Looking back, I should never have felt that way about any workplace, but at the time I was so deeply invested in it that I couldn’t see the bigger picture.”
At the heart of this struggle is rejection. “It feels like a character attack,” said workplace resiliency expert Robyne Hanley-Dafoe. “When people say, ‘It’s professional, it’s not personal,’ you’re kidding yourself. It doesn’t get any more personal than someone questioning a core competency.”
