My last post was a big, emotional one for me, and I’m still a little wrung out from writing it, honestly. So today I want to tell you something completely different — but something that, in its own quiet way, also changed our lives a bit.
Let me back up and tell you the whole thing, start to finish, the way I’d tell it to you over coffee if you were sitting across from me instead of reading this on your phone.
The Vacation That Never Ended
As I mentioned in my previous post, back during the pandemic, we did something that felt reckless and romantic at the time. We packed up and moved to the other side of the world. The plan, and I promise this is true, was a long vacation — three or four months near the beach while everything back home sorted itself out. We figured we’d ride it out somewhere warm and come back once life felt normal again.
That was almost five years ago. We’re still here. And if you read my last post, you already know why.
I could not tell you the exact week the vacation quietly turned into a life. At some point the girls started answering the phone in two languages without thinking about it, and I remember realizing, somewhat late, that this wasn’t a detour from our real life anymore. It was just our life.
For most of that stretch, we got lucky in a very specific, very modern way: both of our jobs came with us. Time zones were annoying, video calls at strange hours were annoying, but remote work meant we didn’t actually have to choose between the beach and the paycheck. I won’t pretend it was always smooth. There were plenty of stretches where I felt guilty for how well things were going for us while so many people back home were struggling. But we said thank you for it, quietly and often, especially once we started hearing what was happening to friends whose jobs weren’t so remote-friendly.
Why I Quit My Job in November
Then came last November. My husband — I’ll call him M here, since this is his story too and he didn’t sign up to have his name on the internet — sat me down one evening and said something like: we’re doing fine financially, you’ve been miserable at your job for a long time, maybe it’s actually time for you to try the thing you keep saying you want to do. Write. Be creative. See if you can make an actual living out of it instead of just talking about it at 11pm when you should be asleep.
He wasn’t wrong about the miserable part. That job had been quietly hollowing me out for a couple of years — nothing dramatic, no single bad boss or awful incident I could point to, just a slow erosion of the parts of me that used to be curious about my own work. I’d stopped bringing anything home to think about. I clocked out mentally around lunchtime most days.
I said yes before he even finished the sentence, basically. So I quit. I remember feeling thrilled and completely terrified within the same five minutes, which I’m starting to think is just what every big, right decision feels like for me. If it doesn’t scare you a little, you’re probably not actually changing anything.
December was tight. Holidays plus one income will do that to a family of five. But we made it work, and we told ourselves it was the temporary, character-building kind of tight — the kind you laugh about later over wine. All good, we kept saying. We’ve got this.
January 16th
Then New Year’s Eve came. 2026. I remember standing in the kitchen, genuinely thinking, this is going to be a good year. I wasn’t being naive about it, or at least I don’t think I was — just hopeful, which for me is its own small kind of progress.
It did not start well.
It was January 16th. M was in his home office, I was in the living room with the girls, probably refereeing some dispute over whose turn it was to pick the show. My phone buzzed. A message from him, from two rooms away: come here, please.
I don’t know how to explain this next part except to say that I felt something drop in my stomach before I even stood up. Some part of me already knew, the way you sometimes know a phone call is bad news before you’ve answered it.
When I got to his desk, he looked up at me and said, “They’re laying people off.”
I said, “okay…” — the way you say okay when you’re bracing for the actual sentence, the one that matters.
He said, “I’m one of them.”
I can only describe what happened in my body next as a cold wave moving through my chest and down. I didn’t know exactly what to do with my face or my hands, so I focused on the one thing I did know how to do: be steady, in case he wasn’t going to be able to be steady himself. I told him we’d be okay. That we’d figure it out. I genuinely don’t know if I believed it in that exact moment, but I said it like I did, because that’s the job sometimes — you say the true-sounding thing and you let it become true later.
It turned out his company had gotten hit hard by the AI shakeup moving through the whole industry — they cut roughly half the workforce in one round, and M was near the top of the list. He was based overseas, on our little pandemic-vacation-turned-permanent-life, which made him one of the more expensive people on the team to keep on paper. Convenient math, from wherever they were sitting when they made that call.
Learning to Live With the Unknown
Ever since that day, it’s felt like we’ve been in survival mode. Not the dramatic, movie-montage kind of survival — the quieter, grinding kind, where you’re re-doing the budget every few days on the back of an envelope and trying not to let your face show anything different at dinner, because the girls are 7, 9, and 11, and they notice everything, and none of this is theirs to carry.
I actually considered going back to my old field, or something close to it, as a stopgap. Then I looked into it and realized the role, as it existed when I left it, basically doesn’t need a human in it anymore. It’s exactly the kind of work AI can do now, faster and for a fraction of the cost. So that door, the one I’d sort of left open just in case, quietly closed itself while I wasn’t looking. That was its own strange gut-punch — not being laid off myself, but realizing the option to go back didn’t really exist anymore either.
Where We Actually Landed
So here’s where things actually stand, six months in. M found a new job in the spring — a real one, benefits and all — but it pays close to half of what he was making before. We said yes anyway, because a smaller paycheck beats no paycheck, and because at some point you stop waiting for the perfect offer and take the one that lets you exhale.
The rest of the gap is on me, more or less. I’m writing more than I’ve ever written, pitching things I wouldn’t have pitched a year ago, and getting creative about how I use what I know. It’s definitely not steady yet, but one step at a time…
We cut what we could cut and kept one small thing — a Friday night the kids still look forward to — because surviving this in a permanently bad mood didn’t seem like the actual goal. Some weeks the math works. Some weeks it barely does. That’s just where we are right now, and I’d rather tell you that honestly than pretend we’ve got it all figured out.
If you’ve made it this far, I’ll just say it plainly: if somebody comes to mind who might be interested in reading my story — either because they’d relate to it, or because you just think they’d like me 🙂 — I’d be endlessly grateful if you passed it along. Visibility is genuinely the thing I can’t manufacture on my own right now.
Something Good, Because I Promised Myself This One Wouldn’t End Heavy
Spain plays Argentina this Sunday, and I am ridiculously excited about it. Football is not usually my thing at all — ask M, he’s given up trying to explain offside to me more than twice — but my family is part American, part Spaniard, and every few years the World Cup does this thing where it pulls every single one of us onto the same couch, cheering for the same team, agreeing on something, for once. That’s rare enough in a house with three opinionated daughters that I’ll take it, gladly, whatever else this year has been.
May the best team win. See you next time.
— L
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