The Person Who Remained

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On Farha, a layoff, and the question nobody asks until they have to.

She had done everything right. Software engineer at Amazon. Product manager at Microsoft. Solo travel. Scuba diving. Skydiving. The life she had once dreamed of, assembled piece by piece and held up against the light to check that it was real. And then early 2023 arrived and took the job title away. And she found herself standing in a room she had furnished very carefully, wondering who she was without the name on the badge.

I — THE QUESTION

Who are you without the title?

The layoff did not arrive as a catastrophe. It arrived as a question. And the question was this. Till now, she had identified herself with the company where she worked. If someone asked who she was, she answered with the job title. Software engineer. Product manager. The title was the answer. The title was the person.

When the title went, the answer went with it. She did not know what to say to people. She did not know what to say to herself.

This confusion, which felt like loss and perhaps was, was also something else. It was the first honest question her career had ever asked her. Not what can you do. Not what are you worth. But who are you. And the honest answer, for the first time in years, was not available.

Most people in this position do one of two things. They find another job title as quickly as possible and return to the certainty of knowing who they are by what they do. Or they stay in the confusion and suffer it as pure loss, never discovering what the confusion was trying to show them.

Farha did something different.

“When I lost my job title, I did not know who I was without it. And that put me in a very bad situation. At that time, I reached a position where I wanted to do something on my own.”

II — THE BECOMING

What appeared in the space the title left

It began with the house. She decorated it. Not because decoration was a career strategy, a plan, or a marketable skill. Because something in her needed to make beauty in the space she inhabited. Because when the external structure of identity fell away, an older and quieter intelligence began to speak. And what it said, in the language of paint colours and arrangement and the particular pleasure of a room becoming what it wanted to be, was this. I have always been here. You were just too busy to listen.

Then the art and dance workshops. She went even though she was not very good at dancing or art. This is the detail that matters most. She was not developing a skill for the market. She was not building a portfolio. She was attending to something in herself that did not require excellence to justify its existence. The going was enough. The being there was enough. The particular quality of aliveness she felt in a room where people were making things with their hands was something the job title had never produced, not even in the best years.

Then clock art. Then a home dining experience. Then kombucha. She started brewing it, learning the slow, patient work of fermentation. The way a living culture transforms what it is given into something it was not. The kombucha began as a private experiment in a Bengaluru city home. Then it moved to a cafe in Indiranagar. Then to Kochi and  Thrissur, cities in Kerala state, India. The brew that began in the space left by a job title had found its way across three cities without once being mistaken for a career plan.

There is a raga in Hindustani classical music called Vihang. The Sanskrit word means that which moves through the sky. A bird. But its deeper meaning lies not in the creature itself but in its manner of movement. A bird is not remarkable because it possesses wings. It is remarkable because it continuously responds to invisible relationships such as wind, gravity, balance, timing, and changing air currents. Flight is not domination over nature. It is profound attunement to it.

Farha, in the months after the layoff, was learning to fly. Not by acquiring new credentials or pivoting toward an adjacent industry or executing a career recovery plan. By becoming increasingly sensitive to what she was actually drawn toward. By attending to the invisible relationships between herself and the things that made her feel most herself. By discovering that the self was not the title. The self was the quality of its becoming.

III — THE LARGER QUESTION

What the career and the life have always been

There is something Farha’s story reveals that the conventional career vocabulary has never had words for.

The decorated house is part of the career. The art workshop is part of the career. The dance is part of the career. The kombucha brewing in a Bengaluru home that travels to Kochi and Thrissur is part of the career. Not because these things are monetised, though some of them eventually are. But because the career is not the job title. The career is the whole life, understood as a continuous act of becoming.

The separation between career and life, which the modern world has treated as obvious and necessary, is a convenience of the industrial age. It was useful when work was something you went to, and life was something you returned to. When the factory gate marked the boundary between the two. But we no longer live in such a world. The knowledge worker, the gig worker, the creative professional, the person whose most valuable capacities are attention, discernment, and the ability to make meaning from complexity, cannot separate the career from the life. They are the same movement. They are the same becoming.

Farha understood this not through theory but through loss. The layoff removed the job title and left the person. And the person, it turned out, had been becoming all along, quietly, in the spaces the job title had not quite reached. The decorated rooms, art and dance workshops, and the living culture fermenting in the kitchen. These were not activities outside the career. They were the career, waiting to be recognised as such.

“Now, if somebody asks me who I am, I would say I am a kind-hearted, loving person. Very empathetic. Who loves to go to art and dance workshops. Who loves to decorate her home. And who also loves to brew kombucha.”

This answer is not a lesser answer than Software or Product Engineer. It is a fuller one. It names a person rather than a function. It describes a quality of being rather than a category of doing. It is the answer that was always true and that the job title had been substituting for, efficiently, profitably, and at the cost of the question never being asked.

Farha turns and asks the question directly. Who are you? Apart from the job title, of course. She asks it with the particular gentleness of someone who has been through the confusion and arrived somewhere more honest on the other side. The question is not rhetorical. It is the most practical question. More practical than what skills do you have. More practical than what is your five-year plan. Because the person who knows the answer to Farha’s question knows something the market cannot easily price and the layoff cannot easily take. They know who they are when the title goes. And that knowledge, it turns out, is the beginning of everything. As Career Architect says, the ordinary, attended to with love, does not stay ordinary for long.

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The author is a Career Architect and Director of Research at CareerTotus Consultants Pvt. Ltd, India. As a researcher, he works at the intersection of career theory, employability, and organisation development. He is the originator of the Post-Skill Professional (PSP) and Enacted Career Identity (ECI) Frameworks. PIc Credits: VP Unnithan

Written by

Dr. Vijayakumar Parameswaran Unnithan

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