How a sudden layoff is making me re-examine my relationship to work

+ "How'd you sleep?" starring a naturopathic doctor in perimenopause

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Starring Dr. Maggie Ney, 47

Occupation: Naturopathic Doctor, Co-Director of the Women’s Clinic at the Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine, Co-Founder of HelloPeri

Location: Santa Monica, California

Let’s connect: @thehelloperi

How’d you sleep and for how many hours usually?

As a doctor — and a mom of three girls — I can honestly say my sleep is something I pay close attention to, even though it’s not always perfect. On weekdays, I usually wake up to an alarm, which likely means I'm not getting quite enough rest.

I’ve learned over time that my ideal sleep rhythm is going to bed around 10 or 10:30 pm and waking naturally around 6:30 am. That sweet spot — about eight hours — leaves me feeling really refreshed, grounded, and ready to show up for my day.

That said, life has its seasons.

Since the L.A. fires in January, I’ve started setting my alarm for 4:33 am twice a week to beat traffic going to my office in Santa Monica.

The 4:33 is random — not sure why I set a random number. The challenge is making sure I get to bed early enough to offset those early wake-ups. I aim to be in bed before 10 pm, but that doesn’t always happen.

There was one time a few years ago I’ll never forget: I had something heavy on my mind, and I couldn’t stop ruminating. Frustrated and restless, I kept replaying a situation in my head. I barely slept. That one night gave me such deep empathy for the women I work with who struggle with sleep regularly. I could feel, viscerally, how a dysregulated nervous system, unresolved emotion, or mental chatter can keep us wide awake.

That’s why I emphasize nervous system regulation in my practice — and in my own life. A soothing, non-negotiable evening routine isn’t a luxury; it’s essential.

Every night I do something that separates my day into evening and gets my body ready to sleep. Without a calm mind and a relaxed body, my sleep suffers. And when sleep is disrupted, so does everything else: like our hormones, immune system, mood, and ability to cope with daily stress.

On my nightstand — lately, it’s a little full

• Red Light face mask
  A few nights a week, I wind down with a 10-minute red light therapy session. It’s become a calming ritual — especially when paired with a short meditation or breathwork session.

• Journals (four!)
  Journaling is one of my go-to tools for stress relief and emotional clarity. I keep a personal journal, and I also write in one for each of my daughters — capturing little memories, sweet moments, or the funny things they say.

  

• The Pivot Year by Brianna Wiest
  This book is currently on top of my stack. It’s a 365-day guide filled with thoughtful prompts and daily insights — perfect for a few quiet moments of reflection before bed.

• My Kindle
  Tucked just beneath The Pivot Year is my Kindle — my nighttime escape. I love ending the day with a good book — or five. Thank goodness for digital libraries!

• Well Rested by MenoLabs: This is my favorite sleep support supplement. I don’t take it every night since I do tend to sleep well most nights. But if I feel particularly wound up or stimulated, I will take one or two capsules at bedtime. Well Rested has a blend of magnesium glycinate, glycine, GABA, L-Theanine, 5-HTP, and melatonin, which helps to quiet my mind and allows me to fall asleep and stay asleep.

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I thought I was the roadrunner, but I’m actually the coyote

How a sudden layoff is making me re-examine my relationship to work

By

Eleanor Whitney

This essay was originally published in PROMOTE YOUR BOOK on May 31, 2025.

The calendar invite appeared early on a Tuesday morning. Quick sync, 15 minutes, 9 am. I knew exactly what that meant. I was losing my job.

I’ve been working full time since I graduated college 20 years ago, and for 10 years before that if you count the odd jobs I did as a teenager: Cleaning horse stalls, mowing lawns, working in a late-’90s internet cafe. On top of full-time jobs, I’ve taken on freelance projects in order to earn extra cash, make ends meet during tight times, or to pursue projects that are interesting to me but don’t quite fit within the bounds of my full time job.

Outside the bounds of paid work, I’ve pursued creative work — writing and playing music, which are both joyful, generative, and revitalizing, but also necessitate administrative aspects, which can feel like a job.

In addition, I got two master’s degrees while working full time: A Master’s in Public Administration I thought was necessary to further my career (it wasn’t, but it did teach me how to make a budget, use Excel, and showed me that I actually love data and quantitative analysis) and an MFA in creative nonfiction, which was not for my career at all — just for myself — but it did open up the opportunity to teach at the university level, which I did for a year while also working and attending school full time.

Within my work, I’ve been more privileged than most: Since college, my jobs have come with health insurance and retirement benefits. When I moved into tech from the nonprofit sector, my jobs enabled me to put money into savings. Since the pandemic, I’ve been able to work remotely, giving me the gift of a highly flexible life.

I was lucky, until my luck ran out.

I’m not listing this work history to brag or show off my hustle, but to illustrate that since an early age, work has been a structuring principle in my life. It’s brought me security, community, and a sense of purpose. It’s also brought me stress, burnout, severe depression, and a sense of self-worth that was too bound up in the outside validation of other people’s feedback, titles, and salary. When I got on the layoff video call, my first question was, “Is this performance-related?” (Answer: No, my position had been “eliminated”).

Work has been my constant through major personal and societal upheavals.

I worked and dodged layoffs through the 2008 recession, Hurricane Sandy, a major breakup with the person I had convinced myself I was going to marry, losing my apartment in a fire, the pandemic, moving across the country, through two master’s degrees, massive protest movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack, while I witnessed the genocide in Gaza, the slide toward fascism in this current administration. As we all have, as we must.

Despite my insistence that we are not our jobs, that I had a hard boundary between my work life and my personal life, my work and job also gave me a sense of satisfaction, and as I see it now, a false sense of security.

I thought that I was the cartoon Roadrunner, swiftly and artfully dodging obstacles, staying several steps ahead of a constant and inevitable threat to my livelihood, coming up with evermore clever solutions to outrun danger, to keep running and to try to find joy in that.

It turns out I’m the coyote: Pursuing a prize that’s always just out of reach until the ground was pulled out from beneath my whirling feet and I was left futilely spinning my legs in the air before crashing down to earth, ensnared by my own ingenious solution.

Capitalism turns us all into the coyote …

Forever needing to come up with new ways to survive while chasing the elusive prize of success, satisfaction, and security, and forever pulling the floor out from under us, so that what we thought was solid turns out to be nothing but an illusion and empty air (not to mention clobbering us with an actual or metaphorical anvil, which can take the form of debt of all kinds, housing insecurity, rising taxes while billionaires revel, and on and on).

The thing is, none of this should be a revelation for me. I know that work won’t love you back. I know that capitalism is capricious and cruel. I know that American society purports to venerate work above all else, but crushes workers for the sake of profits for the few.

I knew that professional women are often pushed off the corporate ladder in their 40s or 50s. I just thought I was smart enough to have threaded the impossible needle where I could be both critical of and removed from the cruelty of capitalism and benefit from it. Or at least had a few more years to build my savings and safety net until I was shoved out of the workforce and deemed too expensive and too experienced. Not so. This sudden layoff has necessitated that I begin the deep, and long, process of assessing my relationship to work, self-worth, and productivity and the much larger role that employment by someone else has played in that.

The crux is that I’m proud of the work I’ve done in tech startups and the arts as a marketer, content strategist, community manager, fundraiser, program officer, arts administrator, and educator. I’m proud that I was able to build a career that felt aligned with my values and skills. I’m proud that I always delivered quality work that felt good to me — that never compromised despite pressures of time, budget, or shifting demands. I’m proud I was able to pivot to new jobs and new industries when I felt a role was no longer fitting. I’m proud that I have built a deep and varied professional network, and despite my recent insistence on separation between professional and personal, I have colleagues who became friends, mentors, and fellow travelers. I realized, however cheesy, that these are accomplishments that no layoff can take away from me.

As it has been so many other times in my life when a crisis has hit, community has been my net. In the past few weeks I’ve had birthday parties in the three places I consider home (Brooklyn, Maine, and California) with cherished friends and family, attended a dear friend’s wedding, recorded a new EP with my band Skirting, taken a mini-California road trip to see friends, and had many conversations with friends and former colleagues, many of whom are in or have been in situations similar to my own. Every conversation brings new insight and clarity, a new angle on my situation, and a new possibility to pursue.

The truth is, every message I was receiving this year, from my intuition and from my body was telling me I needed to slow down, to take a break, to stop driving myself forward in every possible way all the time. It’s a stressful, heartbreaking time in our country and our world and I was trying to knuckle my way through it. I was trying to make up for all the destruction in this world with more and more creative and community work, and pushing and pushing to keep myself relevant at my full time job. While I realize that this break is not exactly the one I needed or asked for, I’m also trying to really listen to myself, reassess, and not just rush into the next thing. Given the current job market it’s also doubtful the “next thing” is right there waiting for me anyway.

This is, as a news outlet may say, a developing story. I don’t have an answer and I don’t know how or where I’m going to land. I’m grateful that I have some financial runway thanks to unemployment, severance, and the savings I was able to put aside (never enough), and a network of incredible people dedicated to helping me figure it out. I feel like there’s three possible paths in front of me:

1. go back to full-time work for a company

2. take on contracting roles

3. or start my own thing.

Most likely I’ll end up with some combination of the three, but it still feels like very early days in knowing what will be the right fit, what will pay me what I need, and what is actually possible.

Now that some frenetic travel is finished (for the time being), I’m settling into the desert summer. Outdoor pool season begins soon. I bought a summer pass for the San Jacinto tram, so I can hike at cooler, higher elevations. I’m also doing 1,000 Words of Summer to kickstart a more regular writing and editing process on my memoir-in-essays manuscript and to try to tackle some of the pieces I promised myself I’d work on and pitch if “If I had time.” I’m also starting the Artist’s Way. I know some people swear by it, some people shrug it off, and some have found it moderately helpful but not life changing. But a few friends were working through it over the summer, so I figured why not join them? I’ll report back to you about my experience!

Before the layoff, I was already slowly working my way through two excellent craft books, both of which are providing me much-needed encouragement and perspective. The first is Dear Writer by Maggie Smith, which contains beautiful vignettes about shaping prose and approaching your work on the page. Smith approaches her work with a sense of playfulness, openness, honesty, and wonder, even when writing about the hard stuff, and reading it feels like a big hug for us anxious writer types.

The other is the exact book I didn’t know I needed: You Must Go On by Brian Gresko. The tagline says it best, “Not a book about how to write, a book about why to write and how to keep at it in a world that wants you to shut the hell up.” I’ve admired Brian’s work building literary community and writerly presence from afar for a long time, but I had the chance to meet him at AWP and pick up a copy of the book. Divided into 30 short missives each one is a pep talk, a dose of reality, a call to action and literary arms, and a reminder of why it’s important to make art even when you feel crushed by capitalism and the caprices of literary coolness. You Must Go On feels like it was written just for me (and you, and all of us). It helps yank me out of my darker moments when I think “Why bother with this work? Just give up now to avoid being disappointed later.” Instead, Brian has given me (and you!) 30 reasons to keep going that have everything to do with making art, connecting with people, and building true community with finding an ever-elusive notion of “success” in the publishing world.

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It’s rough out there. We’ve heard from several women in The Midst community who are experiencing layoffs. How about you?