Layoffs - My Villain Origin Story

I don’t know what actually woke me up at 6am on this particular day but it felt like I had to be awake. Not just awake on my bed, but go downstairs, turn on the tv type of awake. Then I got an email.

Not a phone call. Not a meeting. A message. From my employer. Telling me my position had been terminated. I promise, I thought I was being pranked because it was April 2nd.

I sat with it for a while. That specific kind of shock that doesn't feel like shock at first. It feels like stillness. Like the world just got very quiet.

That night as I was coming to terms with the fact that I now have so much free time, I did something I still can't fully explain. I got on my phone and I signed up for a pottery class. That night. For the next morning. Honestly, it was a long time coming, I had always wanted to take a class in Seattle but they were always sold out no matter how fast I was to sign up.

I don't know why. I'd never thrown clay in my life. I had no reason to believe I'd be good at it or even like it. But something in me needed to make something with my hands. Needed to feel like I was building something rather than watching something fall apart.

I walked into that class the next day not knowing what to expect. I left in a state of calm I hadn't felt in months. Maybe years.

I was completely covered in clay. I had made something that was barely recognizable as a vessel. And I was in love. I was so in love that I googled the closest pottery supply store to me (Armadillo Clay Supplies; they are now family)

Here's what nobody tells you about a layoff: the worst part isn't the lost income or the bruised ego or the uncertainty about what comes next. The worst part is the silence. The sudden absence of a structure that told you who you were and what you were worth every single day. It was very very brutal and as someone who always shows up strong, Internally I WAS A WRECK. I truly do not appreciate how tied to our sense of worth corperate has become and how one can feel like a complete failure especially with the rise and frequency of layoffs.

Pottery gave me back a different kind of structure. Not the kind imposed by a job but the kind that comes from within. The kind that says: show up, use your hands, make something out of nothing, and trust the process.

I signed up for more classes. Then I bought a wheel because the studio was too far and Austin traffic is a special kind of cruel. I was spending 50 minutes driving to class and 30 minutes back but that drive back was always soooo good because of the things I made or learnt in class. Then I converted my garage (sorry to my car, genuinely into a studio). At first I left my car in there but we needed more space especially after I got my Kiln. I filmed everything, not because I had a plan, but because the process felt too beautiful not to document. Plus film is another untapped passion of mine.

I stopped my classes after a month but I continued to learn new techniques on the internet and teach myself so many things. I was failing a lot.

And people showed up. Just like that. Strangers on the internet watching me figure out how to center clay, how to pull walls, how to not collapse everything I'd built with one wrong move. Which felt, honestly, like a metaphor I didn't need anyone to explain to me.

Less than a year later I have done two collection drops. The first one sold out completely. Fifty pieces. Gone. Made in a garage by someone who had never touched clay before the year before.

One thing I got to understand the hard way is that: The thing that feels like the villain of your story is often the thing that pushes you toward the life you were actually supposed to be living.

Getting laid off at 6am on an April morning was supposed to be the worst chapter. It turned out to be the first one.

If you're reading this because you're at the beginning of something — a layoff, a pivot, a life that just got very quiet and very uncertain — I want you to know: go sign up for the class. Whatever your class is. The one that sounds slightly ridiculous and completely unplanned.

That's usually the right one.