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.
This came after years of “grinding,” and “faking it till you make it” as she tried to break into media, coming up as a blogger and juggling other jobs until she was hired into this senior role. “I was burned out and working so hard, so I was not especially well-positioned to deal with the layoff,” she said. “This job was an all or nothing for me, so I would have done anything to keep it. Looking back, I should never have felt that way about any workplace, but at the time I was so deeply invested in it that I couldn’t see the bigger picture.”
Braided into this tangle of emotions was a sense of betrayal. “It was heartbreaking, because I had come to the table with such honesty and earnestness, and I was not met with that,” Mukhopadhyay said. “If anything, my labour was being exploited.”
Recently, quite a few prominent women have opened up about the psychological impact of getting fired — it’s a topic that’s bubbling up in the zeitgeist as we reckon with what female success looks like in a post-Girlboss world. Jennifer Romolini came up in the digital media gold rush of the 2000s; her memoir “Ambition Monster” probes how getting fired caused her to abandon her ambition altogether. And two sacked magazine editors-in-chief, Laura Brown, formerly of InStyle, and Kristina O’Neill, formerly of WSJ Magazine, are at work co-authoring a book called “All The Cool Girls Get Fired,” set to be published in 2026.
The psychological scars that being fired can leave on women — particularly those who identify closely with their jobs — are very familiar to career coach and former recruiter Barbara Morris-Blake. “When I was in executive search, it used to blow my mind when these extremely accomplished women would come in, sit down and just cry,” she said. “They thought they had lost so much of themselves.”
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.
“There’s usually a build up to the firing — you don’t get along with your boss, you’re not making your targets. Whatever that is, it has a huge impact on the high-achiever. It pecks away at self-esteem,” said Morris-Blake, author of a professional empowerment series aimed at ambitious women, the latest of which, “Hey There, High Flyer,” focuses on confidence. “Success becomes a part of their identity; ‘I am my success, my success is me.’ There’s often a real crisis of identity, and I’ve seen women really struggle.”
At the heart of this struggle is rejection. “It feels like a character attack,” said workplace resiliency expert Robyne Hanley-Dafoe. “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.”
It stings even more if you have forsaken or deferred goals in other areas of life to focus on your job. “Whether it be putting off relationship goals, family commitments, they’ve made so many sacrifices and then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘What was the point?’” she said. “It’s like, ‘I literally gave up seasons of my life for this role, and it didn’t end up the way I’d planned, or was promised.’“
Shame can hit here as well. “Guilt is, ‘I did something wrong and got myself fired,’ but shame means, ‘I wasn’t a good enough person,’” said Hanley-Dafoe. “It’s rooted in the fact that this is an attack on identity, and we feel as though we aren’t enough.”
In the case of “at fault” firings, where your termination is blamed on your actions rather than “restructuring” or “market pressures,” you may feel you were set up to fail.
Referring to her own experience, Hanley-Dafoe said, “those performance standards very likely were beyond reasonable human limits. It was a fixed fight, where you were held against a measuring stick that wasn’t achievable. That adds insult to injury, especially when you know people in your organization who also didn’t meet those standards but weren’t fired.”
Case in point: She said she’s heard of managers who used layoffs during COVID as a convenient way to cull employees who were challenging norms or not playing by the rules. “It’s the notion of, ‘Is that woman a difficult person or is she a trailblazer, walking in territory where people haven’t ventured before?”
This is why Hanley-Dafoe encourages women who have been fired to get angry about it, at least initially. “Explore with curiosity questions like, ‘Is it because they just didn’t like me? Was it because I rocked the boat too much?’” she suggested. “Let yourself be angered by the injustice, or even the fact that you will never have answers to those questions.”
A key caveat: “Be mad as hell, but don’t let the blast radius affect future prospects,” cautioned Hanley-Dafoe. (Scrap that LinkedIn post draft where you air out every last grievance with your former employer.) And take the opportunity to do some self-examination. “You do need to go back and look at what happened. It’s painful but important to say, ‘Where did I go wrong?’” she said. “Because then you can forgive yourself. You’re a human.”
Then, it’s time to look forward, because getting fired can be an opportunity for reinvention, or realignment. “You don’t have to figure out everything all at once, but having a little bit of strategic direction is going to be helpful,” said Hanley-Dafoe, who has never had a client get fired and not be employed again within six months. Make a plan that answers the question, “What do I need to do to make sure I’m OK — next week, a month from now.”
A year and a half after being fired, Mukhopadhyay sought therapy to address her lingering distress over it. Part of it was EMDR therapy, which works by taking you through a specific moment of trauma in order to reframe it. “We focused on the firing, and what I experienced during, before and after. It gave me the space to process it,” she said. This allowed her to acknowledge how profound it was for the first time. “I felt like, ‘It’s just a job, I don’t work in an emergency room, how could it have been traumatic? After therapy, I realized that I really had internalized it as trauma.”
This was hard to face—“I was like, ‘How soft am I?’”—but it ultimately led to a much-needed reckoning with the role that work plays in Mukhopadhyay’s life. “It really was a crisis of identity for me, in the way that many people experience because we’ve got so much riding on these jobs, especially the passion jobs.”
Her advice for the next woman who finds herself in this place? “This is not the thing that will define you or your career,” she said. “It defines you as much as you need it to. And there are other opportunities out there, and there are other ways to do work you care about.”
