Being Good at My Job Was Never the Same as Being Safe

On April 1st, 2025 — April Fools' Day, which still feels like a joke someone wrote about my life — I logged in at 6 a.m. and found an email telling me my job was gone. Effective immediately. My whole division, cut in a morning.

I had been a senior graphic designer for five years. I was good at it. I turned complicated science into things people could actually understand. My stakeholders were happy. I had reviews and relationships and a plan to retire there someday.

None of it protected me.

I want to talk about that, because I think a lot of us are carrying around a quiet belief that's setting us up to be blindsided — and it's the belief that if we are just good enough, we'll be safe.

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The lie I didn't know I believed

Nobody ever says it out loud. But so many of us live by it: if I'm competent, if I'm helpful, if I'm indispensable, I'll be okay. They won't let me go. I'll have earned my place.

It's a comforting story. It makes the world feel like a meritocracy, where effort and skill are a kind of insurance policy. Do good work, stay safe.

But being good at your job and being safe in your job are two completely different things. One is about you — your skill, your care, your effort. The other is about a hundred forces that have nothing to do with you: budgets, politics, a new administration, a spreadsheet, a decision made in a room you'll never sit in.

I learned that the hard way, at 6 a.m., on a day named after fools. My competence was real. It just wasn't a shield. It was never built to be one.

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Why this matters for your worth, not just your job

Here's where it gets personal, and where I think it actually matters for the people who wear my shirts.

When you believe competence equals safety, you start believing the reverse, too — that if something bad happens to you, it must mean you weren't good enough. That losing the thing means you failed to earn it.

So when I got laid off, a part of me — the trauma-trained, never-quite-enough part — immediately went looking for what I did wrong. As if I could have out-performed a political decision. As if my worth had been on trial and the verdict had come back guilty.

It hadn't. My worth was never the thing being measured. It wasn't even in the room.

And neither is yours. Whatever you're afraid of losing right now — the job, the role, the place you've worked so hard to secure — if it goes, it will not be a referendum on whether you were good enough. Those are separate things. They have always been separate things. We just get them tangled because being good at something is one of the few kinds of control we think we have.

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What I'd tell you, and what I tell myself

You are allowed to be excellent and still get hurt by something you couldn't control. Those two things can be true at once.

You are allowed to grieve a loss without filing it as a personal failure.

And you are allowed — this is the big one — to stop measuring your worth by how indispensable you are. Because indispensability is exhausting, it's never quite achieved, and it was never the thing that made you worthy in the first place.

I built Self-Care Shirts partly out of the wreckage of that April Fools' Day. The designs I make are the things I needed to hear while I was untangling all of this — that I'm allowed to take up space, that I'm enough as I am, that my value isn't a performance review.

I'm still good at my job. I just don't believe, anymore, that being good at it is what makes me okay.

You're okay too. Not because you've earned it. Just because you are.

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The designs that came out of all this live in the You Are Enough collection — the things I needed to hear while I was untangling worth from worthiness.

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