Some chapters of our lives arrive without warning, reshaping everything we thought was steady and familiar. When I look back at this period of my life, I see a woman trying to hold herself together through fear, uncertainty, and sheer determination. I see someone who had already been knocked down once, only to be hit again before she could fully stand. This is the story of that season, and how I learned to gather the pieces with grace.
There are seasons in life when the world tilts so suddenly that you barely recognize the landscape around you. My breast cancer diagnosis was one of those moments, a jolt that forced me to confront my own vulnerability and strength at the same time. What I did not expect was that another blow was waiting just a few months later.
Five months after hearing the words “you have breast cancer,” I received another life‑altering call. It was November 12, 2021, a date that still echoes in my memory. My company was restructuring, they said, and my role was being eliminated. Just like that, the job I had poured myself into, the one I fought to return to as quickly as possible after surgery, was gone.
I had two surgeries, followed by radiation, and I was healing physically while trying to hold myself together emotionally. Through it all, I pushed myself to get back to work. I did not want cancer to take more from me than it already had. I did not want to fall behind. I did not want to lose the career I had spent years building.
Because I had worked so hard to get there.
I was the girl who started with nothing, who fought her way through school, who earned not one but two master’s degrees while working full time, completing an internship, and raising a family. I was the woman who climbed her way into leadership through grit, long nights, and a belief that education could rewrite the story she was born into. Every step of my career was earned, not handed to me.
So when the call came, it was not just the loss of a job. It was the loss of stability during a time when everything already felt fragile. And even though I knew the restructuring had nothing to do with my performance, I could not shake the feeling that I had somehow failed. Education and growth had always been at the core of who I was. I had fought to stay in school when everything around me said to quit. I had sacrificed, stretched, and persevered to build a life and a career that reflected the woman I wanted to become. Losing my job during one of the most vulnerable moments of my life felt like a personal blow. It felt like all the years of sacrifice, all the nights studying after the kids were asleep, all the moments I pushed through exhaustion, had suddenly been dismissed. It took time to understand that my worth was not undone by that moment, and that losing a job did not erase everything I had fought so hard to achieve.
Cancer had already shaken my world; losing my job felt like the aftershock.
But here is what I have learned since then: sometimes the pieces that break are the ones that make room for a new design.
In the months that followed, I learned to breathe again. I learned to rest without guilt. I learned that my worth was never tied to a job title, a company, or a position on an org chart. I learned that healing, real healing, requires space, time, and grace.
And I learned that even when life feels like it is falling apart, the light still finds its way through the cracks.
Looking back now, I see that losing my job was not the end of something; it was the beginning of a new chapter. A chapter where I honor my body. A chapter where I choose purpose over pressure. A chapter where I share my story so others know they are not alone when the ground shifts beneath them.
Cancer changed me. Losing my job changed me. But neither broke me.
They simply reshaped the glass.
“When life shatters the plans I worked so hard to build, I gather the pieces, honor the cracks, and create something even stronger; because I am the artist of my own stained‑glass story.”