On a warm spring morning, Isaac and I sat down on our porch swing to wait for 10:15 a.m.—the time his company planned to announce the layoffs.
Here’s how it was supposed to go down: If your role was safe, you’d get an email to your work account with details about meetings later in the day. But if you were laid off, you’d get an email to your personal account and simultaneously lose access to all of your work accounts. Isaac had already gathered the files he needed and logged out of everything just in case it was his last day.
By this point we’d endured two weeks of uncertainty as news of the impending layoffs circulated. Each day was full of rumors and speculation about who would be cut and who would be spared, and the not-knowing was taking a toll.
Isaac pulled out his phone and started texting with a couple of coworkers on Slack while also monitoring the green dots next to each person’s name, meticulously watching to see if anyone would lose access. A few minutes before 10:15, he began switching between his work and personal inboxes, refreshing the screen repeatedly. The designated time came and went—10:16, 10:18, 10:21. Eventually, one of his coworkers got his email.
“Not impacted,” he typed to their small group chat.
A few minutes later, the other coworker received hers.
“Not impacted,” she said. But then she was typing again.
“No!” she said. “He’s gone!” Their boss had been laid off.
“OMG!” came next followed by more names they’d heard through the grapevine.
Isaac refreshed his phone again and checked his spam folders.
“Isaac, anything yet?” his coworker asked.
“No, nothing,” he replied.
My heart was racing, and I began to regret the second cup of coffee, which was still in my hand. But out of a need to do something, I sipped it anyway.
“This sucks,” one coworker said.
“I’m dying over here,” said the other.
As it neared 10:30 a.m., Isaac and I started laughing from nerves and confusion and the absurdity of it all. What did it mean that he still didn’t have an email? Were they in the process of locking him out of everything? Did he get lost in the shuffle?
Finally, an email appeared in his work account.
“Your role was NOT impacted by the staff reductions.”
We both stared at it: Not impacted. Not impacted. NOT impacted.
“Just got it,” Isaac typed. “Not impacted.”
“Oh thank Jesus,” came the reply. “I couldn’t handle it if you were gone too.”
Relief, sadness, and frustration rotated through our conversation as we debriefed. I put my head on Isaac’s shoulder, suddenly feeling very tired.
In the aftermath, I couldn’t stop thinking about that phrase: not impacted. It seemed laughable. Regardless of the outcome, what person in the company—what spouse, for that matter—wasn’t impacted by the stress of the layoffs?
Corporate jargon though it may be, I wonder how often we take that idea to heart:
We walk through a painful season, but we downplay our grief because we know people who have been through worse.
Something happens to someone we love, and in our attempts to be there for them, we dismiss the way it affects us.
A stressful situation turns out okay, so we’re hard on ourselves when we continue to feel anxious and out of sorts.
On Christmas night two years ago, Isaac and I were hit by a drunk driver who ran a red light. It was a fiery crash that totaled both cars and sent us and the other driver to the hospital in three separate ambulances. Isaac and I were released from the hospital early the next morning, but we had months of recovery ahead of us.
During that season, I noticed how many people made a point to tell us we were lucky.
“People are killed by drunk drivers so often,” one person said, exaggerating the emphasis. “You’re so lucky to be alive.”
Most of the people who made those comments made them in good faith—they were so honest-to-God grateful we were alive. But the truth was I didn’t feel lucky. All I felt was sadness and anxiety—and crippling headaches.
My days became a blurry dance of trying to recover from a concussion: taking just enough pain medicine so I could sleep; waking up to eat just enough so I wouldn’t throw up. Meanwhile, Isaac had so many cracked bones that he could hardly hobble from the bedroom to the couch. It would be weeks before we could take the world’s slowest walk around our neighborhood.
Even though I understood why people said it, calling us lucky felt like it minimized our pain and missed our current reality. It rushed me toward gratitude long before I was ready.
I do the same thing to myself—I often downplay how I’m feeling simply because other people have it worse. And while there’s something to be said for keeping things in perspective, invalidating my pain isn’t the answer. If I’m hurting, I’m hurting, and denying that doesn’t help anyone, least of all me. I’m beginning to understand that the existence of deeper pain—or perhaps more accurately, the existence of different pain—doesn’t negate mine.
Of course I was thankful we survived and thankful we would recover from our injuries. One look at a picture of our mangled car sent a current of fear coursing through me. But before I could feel gratitude or relief or any kind of hope, I needed to acknowledge that this was bad—that this scary, awful thing happened to us, and that it was not okay.
As author Maggie Smith says:
“It’s hard to treat what you can’t—or won’t—name.”1
In the same way that doctors can’t prescribe medicine if they haven’t first diagnosed their patients, we can’t heal if we don’t first name our pain. I needed to name all that we lost because of the car accident. There were the obvious things like physical health and our car. We also lost agency. We lost time. We lost sleep. But we lost a lot of unseen things too. We lost the ability to drive without fear. We lost trust in systems that were supposed to help us. We lost peace of mind. We both had dreams about other terrible things happening in the weeks after the accident. And as my headaches subsided, my anxiety only increased.
Even if we avoid the worst-case scenario, it doesn’t mean we come out unscathed. Maybe that’s why the phrase not impacted hits a nerve for me. We were impacted. Isaac didn’t lose his job, but he experienced a lot more uncertainty and change than someone who hasn’t been through layoffs. We weren’t as injured in the car accident as we could have been, but we still suffered immensely.
We are impacted by the hard things in our lives. We’re impacted by the fear, the sadness, the instability, the contingency planning. We’re impacted by what happens to people we love. We’re impacted by loss—of things we had and of things we’d hoped for.
It will always be true that someone else has it worse, but the existence of more acute pain (or, remember, simply different pain) doesn’t invalidate our own. We cause more damage when we rush to cover over our pain (or someone else’s) with an exclamation of “It could have been worse!”
One way to name our pain is to learn how to lament. Author Cole Arthur Riley describes lament this way:
“Lament is not anti-hope. It’s not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope. It’s an innate awareness that what is should not be. As if something is written on our hearts that tells us exactly what we are meant for, and whenever confronted with something contrary to this, we experience a crumbling. And in the rubble, we say, God, you promised. We ask, Why? And how could we experience such a devastation if we were not on some mysterious plane, hoping for something different. Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. And our lament as deep as our hope.”2
I’m still turning over this idea, still trying to grasp how lament is tied to hope. But I am drawn to the truth that hope doesn’t equal happiness. It doesn’t equal positivity or undying optimism. Hope can be and is directly tied to pain and suffering. It’s a declaration that this isn’t how things are supposed to be.
Healing begins with naming the ways we’ve been impacted, not by comparing or minimizing, downplaying or denying. Naming our hurt doesn’t make us ungrateful; it simply makes us honest. It’s not an instant remedy, but it releases a little of the pressure building up on the inside, and that’s a step in the right direction.
Not impacted may just be corporate jargon, but the words we use shape what we believe to be true. Admitting we were impacted is one small way to push back against untruth.
So start there—start by naming your pain. Make a list of everything that’s hard about what you’re facing right now. You could write things down or talk it out with a trusted friend. As you make your list, resist the urge to compare and judge. Just notice what comes up. For now, that’s enough.
And when you see someone else who is hurting, remind yourself that you don’t have to fix it. Instead, we can look each other in the eye and say, “I’m so sorry” and “That’s so hard” and “You’re not alone.”
Because if it’s true that we’re all impacted, then it’s also true that we’re not alone. And for that I’m deeply grateful.
From Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. This memoir is admittedly heartbreaking at times, but Smith’s writing is gorgeous and it’s well worth the read.
From Cole Arthur Riley’s This Here Flesh. Riley’s writing is powerful and poignant. I found her descriptions of lament especially helpful, and I keep coming back to them again and again.
This hits so close to home today. Thank you for writing it, friend 🫶🏻
This is hard and beautiful, Mis. I really related to this quote: “ It rushed me toward gratitude long before I was ready.” Thank you for your honesty. That layoff situation sounded excruciating!