When Your Job Breaks Up With You — 'It Feels Less Like Unemployment, More Like Divorce'

“How’s the job search going?” he asked. “It’s tough,” I said. “It feels like I was married to the man of my dreams, and then he suddenly demanded a divorce. Now I’ve got a month to marry someone new.” 

I was fired from my job when I spoke to the media about a colleague detained and incarcerated by ICE. Ten years of building a program, forming relationships, and caring for traumatized kids and teens  —  gone.

One of my last memories there was leading a spirituality group in the chapel on Friday afternoon. We sat in a circle, and each kid shared their prayer requests earnestly, with hope. With bowed heads and open hearts, we lifted up their gratitude and pain and desires.

When my job broke up with me, it was both horrible and anticlimactic.

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An hour later, I sat on a curb, frozen. A woman approached tentatively and asked if I was alright. I snapped back into my body. Told her I was. I wasn’t.

I didn’t want my friend, who had met up with me, to talk to anyone about me. It echoed back to when my brother died, and I felt like if I didn’t say it, it might not be true.

The man who felt like a big brother, my boss, delivered the news via Teams. I dissociated. I heard myself calmly accepting my termination. Blank eyes, I told my bosses and the HR representative to have a good day, and logged off Teams.

It didn’t work when I was ten, and it didn’t work this time either. I sent my kids to my brother’s house for the weekend and sat quietly, watching television for the first time in years. I tried not to think.

The next day, I resumed my advocacy work. Media interviews, events. Anything to keep my friend’s name out there and continue to fight for his safety and freedom. Once the media calls died down, I was forced to sit with my pain.

Depression hit like a freight train. My lifelines — reading, writing, excitement — vanished overnight. Food turned sour in my mouth, sleep felt impossible, and my house filled with a heaviness I couldn’t shake.

I haven’t read much about the grief of job loss. At this point, I think I could write a book.

I tried to accept that I was no longer employed at the children’s hospital where I’d spent about 20,000 hours of my life. And when you lose a job, you’re supposed to find another one.

But my ring finger still carried a tan line that might never fade. The other day, as I left for my walk, I noticed myself subconsciously reaching up to my chest to ensure my badge was there. It wasn’t.

At Kings Island last weekend, I ran into three former colleagues. They smiled widely, eyes lit up. It took me a minute to register who they were. 

“Chaplain Lizzy!” they said, and it clicked into place. It hadn’t been long since I’d seen them last. But it had also been a lifetime.

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It felt like bumping into my ex-husband’s friends — people who hadn’t chosen to give me up, who looked sad about the loss. Their smiles shifted from excited to the edge of sadness. 

The separation between us reminded me that they were really his friends first. Their warmth and enthusiasm reminded me that not everyone wanted this divorce.

Divorce causes so much collateral damage. They had a debriefing at my location to provide support for staff around my loss. My friend said a nurse colleague cried as she remembered me praying with a child in the hallway.

I wanted to be the one to lead the debriefing for staff. But I couldn’t comfort people when their pain stemmed from my absence.

I told my work partner to say goodbye to the kids for me. To let them know I didn’t want to leave them. I want them to know that I’m still excited by how hard they’ve worked, how much progress they’ve made, and the incredible lives unfolding before them.

I wish I could tell the kids myself how much they’ve meant to me. I didn’t get a goodbye party. Just a notice that if I’d left any personal items in the office, I could submit an itemized list for my managers to pick up.

I hadn’t left anything I needed. Just a twelve-pack of Cokes I’d brought in so my kids wouldn’t drink them. A few days after my termination, I started applying.

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Starting the job search, I feel like someone who hasn’t dated in decades — who knew Indeed would feel so much like Tinder?

I don’t want any of these guys. I know my type. And he left me. As I scroll through, I want to exit the page altogether. My eyes well with tears. Bile rises in my throat.

I applied for a director position. Enough out of my league that I could tell myself I was getting out there even as I expected the rejection that came.

I felt the same way about a pastoral care minister position in Myrtle Beach. I knew I needed to move on while also knowing I had no intention of moving away.

How can I be me when I don’t get to spend my day doing spiritual assessments with teenagers struggling to find purpose and hope? How can I be me when I’m not sitting in a circle of middle schoolers, discussing who God is to them, and how those beliefs impact their mental health?

I try to feel a little excited about the possibilities before me. Instead, I feel like a shell of myself.

I didn’t know for sure that my marriage to my job would last forever, but I never thought the ending would look like this.

Shortly after receiving my termination notice, I received an enthusiastic mailing from our hospital system thanking me for a decade of service and inviting me to select a gift from the catalog. It felt like receiving flowers ordered before a breakup.

I drove by my old job the other day, blinking back tears, swallowing bile. That was my home. Those were my people. Now, it’s just the place I used to work. And the staff are just people I used to know. The turnover there means that in a year or two, I will hardly even be a memory.

Social media comments remind me that ten years of ministry didn’t disappear as soon as I walked out the door. “You are, without a doubt, the MOST influential person I’ve ever seen step foot on our units. Watching you change lives will forever be a blessing to me.

I hope something of me remains in the program I built, in the staff I walked alongside, and in the kids who let me into their lives. I hope there is enough of me left to begin again. Enough to swipe right. I know, in my soul, I still have more love  —  and more spiritual care — to give.

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Lizzy Dieng is a board-certified chaplain and a writer for Medium publications such as The Virago, Backyard Church, and The Parenting Portal. A neurodivergent mom of five, she writes the raw truth about mental health, spirituality, and living abundantly.”