You're fired

Losing ajob can be a lot more traumatic than youd think. Authors and experts unpack the experience

- SARAH LAING

Being told that you're not good at your job is particularly unmooring when you have made career achievement an anchor for your entire sense of self.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay recounts being fired from a management job in detail in her new book "The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning," which aims to reimagine our relationship with work.

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.

Looking back, Samhita Mukhopadhyay is pretty sure she had a nervous breakdown after she got fired from her management job. She experienced intense chest pain, an inability to get out of bed and exacerbated coping mechanisms like drinking too much and eating to numb her feelings.

"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.