On 30 June I had a job. On 1 July I didn’t.

On 30 June I had a job. On 1 July I didn’t. This is my retrenchment South Africa story, and I’m still in the middle of it

That’s the whole story, really, if you strip away everything I still need to say about it. One day I was the Head of Customer Experience and Support, nine years deep into a company I had built myself up in from the ground floor. The next day I wasn’t anything, at least not according to them. No notice period that mattered. No conversation that had been honest enough to prepare me. Just a meeting, and then it was over.

We saw it coming, if I’m honest. The budget cuts had been happening for months. Services and products quietly disappearing. That particular kind of scrambling energy you feel in a workplace when everyone upstairs is trying to claw back money that isn’t there anymore. And still, we had hope. We’d made it through Covid without a single retrenchment, even while we shut down ninety percent of the business at one point. So when things got shaky again this year, some part of us genuinely believed we would make it through this too, because we always had. We believed the people telling us they were doing their best. I still believe most of them were.

What I can’t make peace with is June itself. The whole month was meeting after meeting, always with an answer promised for “next week.” Next week’s meeting would tell us. Then next week’s meeting became the following week. I don’t know what was happening behind closed doors and I’m not going to pretend I do, but from where I sat, it felt like the answers kept getting deferred right up until the last possible moment, and by the time it came, there was no cushion left at all; no notice period, no runway, nothing to soften the landing for people whose entire households depended on that income.

We went from stable to desperate in a single meeting, with no space in between to prepare.

Nine years. I worked my way up in that place through nothing but hard work and sacrifice, and I walked away with nothing to show for it except a severance that’s now folded into a liquidation process, which means I genuinely don’t know when, or if, I’ll ever see it. On top of that, fifteen percent less than a full month’s salary for June, after nine years. That’s the part that makes me angriest, if I’m being completely honest with you. Not the loss of the job itself, but the way the ending was handled, like none of the years before it counted for anything.

This job was the one constant thing in my life. No matter what else was happening – and if you’ve read anything else on this blog, you know plenty else has been happening – I always had that. It got my kids and me through hard seasons before, so I trusted it would again. And now that stability has just been pulled out from under me, at 41, as the only income in my house, providing for three kids and my mother.

I’m not writing that for sympathy. I’m writing it because it’s the truth of my situation, and I think working moms deserve to read something that doesn’t pretend the stakes aren’t this high.

I’ll be honest about something else too, something I’m still sitting with and probably will be for a while. There were things my team and I had to do in service of that company towards the end that didn’t sit right with our own values. Things that meant disappointing people, letting them down, being colder and more clinical than we actually are as people, because the business needed us to be. I did it because I believed, at the time, that I was protecting something worth protecting.

Looking back now, knowing how it ended, I’m not sure that belief was ever going to be repaid. That’s a harder thing to carry than the job loss itself, and I don’t have a neat way to close that thought yet. I’m still working through having become someone different for nine years for a company that, in the end, treated all of us like we were replaceable line items in a spreadsheet.

I won’t pretend I have this figured out. I’m applying for jobs properly, not just anything that lands in my inbox. I’m 41, and I know exactly what I’m worth and what I need from whatever comes next, and I’m not interested in starting over from a position that doesn’t respect that. Some interviews are happening. Nothing is decided. I don’t know yet how this chapter ends, and if you’re expecting me to wrap this up with some tidy lesson about resilience, I don’t have one for you today. I might in a few months. Not now.

What I do have, and what I keep coming back to when everything else feels like too much, is the people I did those nine years alongside. The way everyone in that group has shown up for each other since the first of July has genuinely been the most beautiful thing I have witnessed in a long time. People checking in on each other, sharing leads, sitting with each other’s anger and grief without trying to fix it, celebrating each small win like it’s a shared one. In the middle of navigating a retrenchment South Africa doesn’t really prepare you for, the people have been everything.

We built something together in that place, whatever else it turned out to be, and I am going to miss every single one of them. If there’s anything I’m certain of right now, in the middle of not being certain of much, it’s that.

There’s a legal process underway that I’m not in a position to discuss in detail. What I’ve written here is my own emotional experience of what happened, not a factual account of the proceedings.

Also read part 2 of this series: When the Job Hunt Feels Like Rejection on Repeat

If this resonated, I’d love to have you along for whatever comes next.