On the exquisite agony of being alive and paying attention.
I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, celebrate, scream, or crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.
And the truly absurd part is that every single one of those reactions feels entirely appropriate.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
Charles Dickens wrote those words nearly 170 years ago, and here I am, in November 2026, feeling like the man had somehow gotten hold of my calendar.
A few days ago, I was boarding a plane for my first real vacation in years. I had been looking forward to this trip for what felt like an eternity. I needed the escape. I needed the laughter, the novelty, the freedom to exist somewhere other than inside the endless machinery of work and responsibility.
And just as I was preparing to leave, the news started trickling in.
Layoffs.
At my company.
Not a handful of positions. Not a little restructuring here and there. A massacre of an organizational chart.
I didn’t know the extent of it yet. I didn’t know who was affected, how many people were gone, or whether my own job was in jeopardy. I only knew that something terrible was happening at the place where I’d spent years building my career.
So I made a decision.
I was getting on that goddamn plane.
I would put the fear in a box, lock it up as tightly as I could, and deal with whatever awaited me when I returned. For once in my life, I was going to take the vacation I’d worked so hard to afford, both financially and emotionally.
Of course, anxiety doesn’t respect a vacation itinerary.
It came along anyway. A stowaway in my carry-on. It followed me through airports and restaurants and moments of genuine happiness, reminding me every so often that the life I was returning to might look very different from the one I’d left.
But I did my best to enjoy myself.
And then I came home to one of the most extraordinary nights of my life.
I was waking up from a nap after a long day of travel when my phone started lighting up.
My college roommates and I were texting each other in increasingly frantic disbelief.
OMG. This could really happen.
OMG. Is this REALLY going to happen?!
OMG. IT’S OFFICIAL. IT REALLY HAPPENED.
AND OUR GOVERNOR CONCEDED!!!
We had all attended the University of Texas at Austin together. We’d walked the same campus as James Talarico. These same roommates had actually known him through the University Democrats.
And now, all these years later, we were watching history unfold in the state that raised us.
Texas.
My Texas.
The place where I was born. Where I grew up. Where my family and so many of my oldest friends still live. The place that has always been a part of my identity, even when I’ve struggled to reconcile that identity with what the state has come to represent politically.
For so long, being a Texan has felt like an exercise in explaining myself. Defending the people I love while condemning the politics I despise. Trying to articulate that the Texas I know is so much bigger, richer, kinder, and more complicated than the version the rest of the country sees on television.
And suddenly, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Pride.
Uncomplicated, full-throated, bursting-out-of-my-chest pride.
Pride in being a Texan.
Pride in being an American.
I don’t even know how to describe what happened inside me as the results became real. Relief isn’t a big enough word. Neither is excitement. Neither is happiness.
It was a full-body takeover. Like my mind and heart had briefly slipped the bonds of gravity, and I was suspended somewhere above myself, watching something I’d hardly dared to imagine become reality.
I cried.
Happy tears. Astonished tears. The kind that arrive before your brain has even finished processing why.
And it wasn’t just Texas.
Across the country, people were celebrating. The following morning, and throughout the day, my Instagram and TikTok feeds were overflowing with joy. Videos of strangers cheering, people dancing, people crying, people laughing in disbelief. Memes so ridiculous and perfectly timed that I would burst out laughing only to find myself crying again seconds later.
There was something almost intoxicating about it.
After years of feeling battered by greed, corruption, cruelty, and the relentless normalization of things that should never have become normal, I was watching people remember that they had power.
That they could organize.
That they could show up.
That they could say, collectively, enough.
For the first time in what feels like forever, I let myself imagine that the tide might actually turn. That the oppression and terror had a real end in sight.
Not that everything would suddenly be fixed. Not that one election could undo years of damage. But that perhaps we weren’t condemned to keep moving in the same direction forever.
That perhaps hope wasn’t just another way of setting ourselves up for disappointment.
That perhaps the country I love, despite all the reasons it has given me to despair, was still capable of becoming something better.
God, it felt good.
It felt so fucking good.
And then I opened LinkedIn.
What a spectacular way to come crashing back to Earth.
While one corner of my digital world was erupting in celebration, another was filling with devastation.
One post after another.
Colleagues announcing that their positions had been eliminated. People I’d worked alongside, collaborated with, learned from, laughed with. People who had given years of their lives to the same company I had.
Suddenly unemployed.
Suddenly searching.
Suddenly having to figure out how to pay their mortgages, provide for their families, maintain their health insurance, and explain to their children why everything might be changing.
And the posts just kept coming.
At first, I was confused. Surely this couldn’t be as widespread as it seemed.
Then I saw someone I knew personally.
Then another.
And another.
The sheer scale of it began to emerge, and with it came a sickening realization: the majority of my division had apparently been wiped out in one fell swoop.
Decisions made at the very top, handed down with such breathtaking disregard for the people affected that even managers and directors were learning what had happened in real time.
Imagine that.
Imagine being responsible for a team of people, spending years cultivating relationships and building programs and working toward shared goals, only to discover that someone several levels above you had decided those people were no longer necessary.
And nobody thought you deserved to know.
Nobody thought they deserved to know until the decision was already being carried out.
I learned much of what was happening from LinkedIn before I learned it from my own employer.
Then came the emergency meetings. Calendar invitations appearing almost as quickly as the goodbye posts.
The explanations, such as they were, came after the damage had been done.
And what did we get?
Assurances that these changes would make us stronger.
Reminders that we are, after all, a for-profit company.
Oh, well, thank goodness someone cleared that up. Here I was under the impression we’d been operating a charitable organization this whole time.
What an insulting thing to offer people in the aftermath of something so profoundly destabilizing.
As though the employees who spent years generating revenue, solving problems, retaining customers, building programs, and making the whole damn enterprise function had somehow forgotten that the company exists to make money.
We know.
Believe me, we know.
What we apparently misunderstood was how little that loyalty might mean when the numbers on a spreadsheet stopped telling the story leadership wanted them to tell.
I’ve spent years bleeding the corporate equivalent of team colors.
I believed in the work. I believed in the people. I took pride in what we accomplished. I cared about the company doing well, not merely because my paycheck depended on it, but because I felt invested in its success.
And now?
Now I feel like I’m being gaslit in real time.
Or, as the youths say, they’re playing in our faces.
I understand that businesses have to make difficult decisions. I understand that public companies face enormous pressure to deliver results. I understand that the transition to becoming publicly traded introduces a whole new set of expectations and consequences.
But I also believe that the way a company handles those pressures reveals something fundamental about its values.
And from where I’m standing, the decisions surrounding our transition to the public market have been badly mishandled, with the consequences now landing squarely on the people least empowered to prevent them.
People who showed up.
People who did their jobs.
People who trusted that their hard work meant something.
And I’m not naïve enough to believe that employment is a sacred covenant. I know corporations aren’t families, no matter how enthusiastically they print the word on banners and PowerPoint slides.
But surely there is some space between expecting a company to love you and expecting it to treat you like a human being.
Surely we haven’t set the bar so low that basic dignity is now considered an unreasonable business expense.
And here’s the part that makes me feel like an absolute fraud.
I still have my job.
For now.
I am one of the lucky ones.
For now.
And I am so, so grateful.
I cannot overstate the relief of realizing that my name wasn’t on the list. That I could still log in. That my paycheck would continue. That, at least for today, the financial foundation of my life remained intact.
But the relief is tangled up with something much uglier.
Guilt.
Fear.
Grief.
The awful awareness that my good fortune exists alongside someone else’s catastrophe.
I keep thinking about the people who weren’t spared. The ones updating their résumés tonight. The ones staring at their bank accounts. The ones wondering whether they should tell their kids yet.
And then I think about myself.
How long do I have?
Am I next?
What happens to the work that remains? To the teams that have been gutted? To the people expected to absorb the responsibilities of colleagues who were deemed expendable?
What exactly am I supposed to feel secure about?
Keeping my job right now feels like finding a life raft in the middle of the ocean. But a life raft is not safety. It’s temporary survival. I’m profoundly grateful to be aboard… but I’m still surrounded by water. And I have no idea whether anyone is coming to rescue me.
And there are people I care about who didn’t make it aboard.
How do you celebrate that?
How do you even call it winning?
I have survived to die another day.
Apparently, that’s the prize.
And all the while, Texas is celebrating.
The country is celebrating.
People are dancing in the streets and crying in their living rooms and calling their parents and texting their old college friends.
History is happening.
Hope is happening.
And I want to be fully present for every glorious second of it.
But then I see another LinkedIn post.
Another person I know, another career interrupted, another carefully constructed life suddenly thrown into uncertainty.
And I feel the joy drain out of me.
Until another video comes across my feed, and there it is again.
Hope.
And then grief.
And then gratitude.
And then anger.
And then joy.
Back and forth, back and forth, until the emotions become so enormous and contradictory that I can barely distinguish one from another.
It’s almost as though I can’t properly feel either.
The happiness is too big to contain.
The sadness is too big to comprehend.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, I am simply trying to be a person.
A person who cares.
Which, as it turns out, is an exhausting fucking business.
I keep returning to the strange symmetry of these two events.
On one hand, I watched ordinary people exercise extraordinary collective power.
People who had spent years feeling unheard, dismissed, or powerless came together and made themselves impossible to ignore.
On the other hand, I watched ordinary people discover just how little power they possessed over decisions that could upend their entire lives.
A handful of executives could change the trajectory of hundreds of families with decisions made behind closed doors.
Managers didn’t know.
Directors didn’t know.
The people whose livelihoods were at stake certainly didn’t know.
And as it always goes, both things are true.
We can possess enormous power together and almost none alone.
We can change the course of a state, perhaps even a country, and still be unable to protect the person sitting in the cubicle next to us.
We can demand accountability from our elected leaders while being expected to accept corporate decisions with little more than a reassuring email and an invitation to remain optimistic.
I don’t know what to do with that contradiction.
I don’t have a clever solution.
I don’t have a five-point plan for fixing corporate America or a stirring conclusion about the inevitable triumph of democracy.
And I certainly don’t have the stomach to turn my colleagues’ suffering into a motivational lesson about embracing change.
Some things are just awful.
They don’t become less awful because we find a way to write about them.
But neither does the awfulness erase the beauty.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
I want to celebrate.
I want to celebrate the people of Texas. I want to celebrate my old college friends and the wild, improbable joy of watching something we once could barely imagine become real. I want to laugh at every ridiculous meme. I want to cry at every video of someone realizing that maybe, just maybe, the future doesn’t have to look like the past.
I want to feel proud of where I come from.
I want to feel proud of my country.
I want to believe that things can get better.
And I do.
But I also want to grieve.
I want to grieve for the people who lost their jobs. For the relationships and teams and institutional knowledge that were severed in an instant. For the trust that has been broken. For the anxiety now living in the bodies of everyone who remains.
I want to be angry that so much of our security depends on decisions we have no meaningful say in.
I want to be grateful that I survived without pretending that survival feels like safety.
And I want to acknowledge something that feels almost embarrassingly obvious, but that I seem to be learning over and over again:
Being human is an exquisitely painful experience.
Not simply because terrible things happen.
But because wonderful things happen, too.
And they don’t have the decency to wait their turn.
The world doesn’t pause its suffering so we can enjoy a victory. It doesn’t postpone its miracles until we’ve finished grieving. It doesn’t organize itself into neat chapters with appropriate emotional transitions.
It just keeps happening.
All of it.
At once.
There are people experiencing the best day of their lives right now. People experiencing the worst. People falling in love, burying parents, bringing babies home, losing houses, getting married, receiving diagnoses, finding their purpose, and wondering how the hell they’re going to make it to Friday.
Somewhere, someone is celebrating a future they never thought possible.
Somewhere else, someone is mourning a future they thought was guaranteed.
And sometimes those two people are the same person.
Sometimes they’re me.
I suppose that’s what Dickens understood.
Not that there are good times and bad times, neatly separated by history or circumstance.
But that the best and worst are often happening simultaneously. That hope and despair aren’t opposites so much as reluctant roommates, forever fighting over the thermostat of the human heart.
I don’t know whether this election will mark the beginning of the transformation I so desperately hope for.
I don’t know what my company will look like six months from now.
I don’t know whether I’ll still have my job, or whether the people who lost theirs will find something better, or whether the institutions we place our faith in will ever learn to value human dignity as much as they value the bottom line.
I know only what I feel today.
I am happy.
I am heartbroken.
I am grateful.
I am furious.
I am hopeful.
I am afraid.
And I am all of those things without contradiction, even when they feel impossible to reconcile.
It is hard to be happy when there is so much suffering so close to me.
And it is hard to be sad when there is so much joy in the world.
But perhaps I don’t have to choose.
Perhaps I can let the tears come without demanding to know which emotion they belong to.
Perhaps I can celebrate what deserves celebrating and mourn what deserves mourning, without diminishing either.
Perhaps the best I can do is remain open to all of it, even when it hurts.
Because what a terrible, wonderful privilege it is to be alive for all of it.
It was the best of times.
It was the worst of times.
Find me where intention meets whatever answers back.
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