Corporate loyalty died. You didn’t.

The layoff didn’t destroy something real. It revealed something that had already been hollow.

I spent twenty years at HP and HPE as the model employee — 266% of target one year, 62 unused vacation days, voluntary pay cuts when the company needed them. In December 2024, it ended in under a minute. What collapsed wasn’t a job. It was the scaffolding I’d used to answer “who am I?” Six months later, I was healthier and happier than I had been in years — and building for the first time in my life something with my own name on it: a book, a company, and a second act on my own terms.