[I got fired on the day I was leaving Denver]

But you don't even know how I ended up there. Two years after COVID struck New York City, I packed my bags and moved to Colorado — to get out of the cityscape and be closer to nature. I spent two years backcountry skiing with my mountaineer cousin, working contracts I'd brought with me from New York. For a while, I could breathe. But one by one, those contracts dwindled as clients recoiled from an economy that hadn't stopped contracting since the pandemic. Before I fully registered what was happening, I was back in survival mode.

Around that time, I found out my father was sick. I was down bad and hopped into a lead design role at a bullshit smart dog collar company — primarily because the founder fast-tracked my application and promised me the world. What I came to realize shortly after was that he'd found himself in hot water after SoftBank pulled back, panicked, and quietly fired his entire design team. I showed up as the sole designer, forced to fulfill the work of the entire department. The company's app has a feature used to recover a pet if it goes missing. The founder asked me to build a flow soliciting video testimonials from users immediately after they exited that recovery flow — not for product improvement, but purely to generate marketing content. He wanted panicked pet owners to record video right after losing a pet. Maybe they recovered it. Maybe they didn't. Maybe they found it dead on the side of the road. I'm a user-centered design practitioner. The mandate was counter to everything I stand for. I presented back a myriad of elegant, soft-touch alternatives. He refused — and reprimanded me for working proactively. After that, I was quietly pushed out over the course of my last summer in the mountains. Taken off product, buried in demeaning busywork. I had explicitly shared with executive staff my plan to move to Florida because my father was dying. Despite this, they flooded me with work — knowing they intended to fire me, extracting everything they could first. On my last day — movers scheduled for the afternoon — they pushed me to hit an arbitrary marketing deadline that morning. The moment I handed off the work, my accounts froze. Everything except a Slack message from the founder: "Can I connect?" He fired me from a balcony on his end-of-summer vacation in Spain. I genuinely believe he staged the video to show me his view of Barcelona. Then he blocked me from Slack and from accessing my own work. On moving day. My father had cancer.

[I put on a blank face and drove

TWELVE hours through the night]

Twelve hours is a long time to think. I first thought about the recruiter who had oddly reached out two weeks before I was fired. No prior relationship, abominable job market.

I thought about twenty years of doubting myself while watching less capable people steer the ship. I thought about imposter syndrome and sharp self-awareness existing in the same body. I thought about how tech companies hire on aesthetics, exotic accents, and perception — not always on capability. I thought about how bootcamps flooded the market at my mid-career marker, devaluing years of hard-won experience overnight. I thought about how ivy league credentials suddenly outweighed actual craft and experience. I thought about how the work itself got commoditized — posted online, copied offshore, replicated by AI. How the people who dedicated their lives to this work kept losing to people who learned to perform it. I thought about my father. How I'd left Colorado to support him, and how instead he'd have to support me.

[I thought about all of it,

Alone for twelve hours in the dark]

I waited a long time to share this story. I didn't post my layoff on LinkedIn because I despise LinkedIn. I didn't write this for industry peers who would surely gawk over my misfortune. I wrote this down hoping that some kind-hearted, incredibly talented younger designer finds their way here. If that's you, here's what I have to tell you: Make your own rules, the old ones no longer apply. Most of the design studios and SaaS companies you can't seem to get an interview with are failing business models. At least 65% of tech recruiters are ravenous, desperate, and going broke themselves. If things feel unfair and upside down right now, it's because they are — but this industry has always been held together by duct tape and spaghetti code. None of this is about you. You are awesome. Hopefully, you'll come realize there is no silver bullet and even 20 years of experience is not a magic amulet. There are people like me — tons of us — who believe in the power of design and what you have to offer the world. It's okay if you're a wallflower who'd rather invest in craft than promote yourself on social media. Hard work does still pay off, even in the age of AI. It's okay to be true to yourself. The scope of design extends far beyond what you may have initially intended to practice, and there is still a place for you in this world. You don't need permission to create and build things. Don't give up. Start showing teeth.

[If your image does not work, put a dog in it,

If it still does not work, put a bandage on the dog]