We have no funerals for careers, no ceremonies for the day the badge stops working. Mariangela Zanchetta writes honestly about the grief that follows work’s endings, and why the wound is proof of how much you cared.
A few hours ago I was telling a story about a work meeting that happened almost a year ago, and I started getting hives.
The story was old. But my body has never been particularly interested in timelines. Halfway through the story my skin began reacting as though the event were still unfolding in front of me instead of staying in the past where I thought I had carefully filed it.
Professional grief is one of the few griefs our culture still struggles to recognize as grief at all, as though pain experienced inside a professional world somehow hurts less than pain experienced anywhere else. As though the betrayals, humiliations, pressures, and erosions that happen at work do not reach deeply enough into a life to leave an actual wound.
And we are living through a moment of enormous professional grief and loss, with almost no language for it.
Nearly 246,000 people in the technology industry lost their jobs in 2025 alone. By May of 2026, well over 100,000 more have already followed. Each of those numbers is a person whose professional world ended, often without warning, often inside a system that had already decided the announcement was a business update rather than a human event.
But let’s start where professional grief usually starts: before anything officially ends.
It accumulates inside ordinary days. Sleep no longer restores you properly. You begin preparing for meetings like someone bracing for impact. The Sunday dread starts arriving earlier and earlier until eventually part of Saturday belongs to it too. You become so practiced at suppressing yourself to survive that the suppression itself starts to feel like personality.
And because you are still functioning, still delivering, and everyone around you also appears exhausted, you normalize it too.
You tell yourself this is simply what leadership feels like. This is scale. This is responsibility. This is America.
Meanwhile, some part of you has already started grieving the distance between your functioning self and your actual self. That is, if you even remember what your actual self feels like.
I did not.
I remember very clearly the moment something in me finally gave out.
I was on a call with a C-suite executive whose division I had spent years helping build. Teams, systems, operational structures, things hundreds of people depended on every day. By that point I was carrying more than I could sustainably hold, although at the time I would simply have called it “handling things.”
Women in leadership become very fluent in that language.
During the conversation, with others on the call, she called us fuckers. Then again. And again. Sixteen times, actually. I counted them, which probably says something uncomfortable about the level of dissociation required to remain calm and functional in moments like that.
The next day she asked to talk.
“Well, yesterday happened,” she said.
Not an apology. More the acknowledgment of an event whose existence could not reasonably be denied, followed by an invitation to tell her what support I needed to “fix it.”
I told her. I had already documented the problems repeatedly long before that conversation, and nothing meaningful had changed. But this time, exhausted by the endless cycle of escalation without resolution, and with whatever protective layer I normally operated through finally gone, I asked the question I had been carrying privately for months.
“What’s going to be different this time?”
I still think about the silence that followed.
Then:
“Are you in, or are you out?”
In a moment of something I can only describe now as exhausted accuracy, I answered more honestly than I had managed in years.
“I’m not quite sure. Can I think about it until tomorrow?”
Three months later, I was part of the restructuring.
The moment I stopped performing complete alignment, the moment my loyalty was no longer a clean, enthusiastic yes, I became legible as disposable.
I think many people understand this feeling now, even if they have never said it aloud.
Modern professional life increasingly asks for forms of emotional coherence that become difficult to sustain over time. You are expected not only to perform, but to perform belief even while the structures around you are visibly destabilizing.
I sat through countless all-hands meetings that became shallower over time, where the language remained relentlessly optimistic while everyone around me was doing math. “How many months until the next vest?”
The arc of professional endings was never perfect, but it used to contain more friction. Conversations. Warnings. Time to metabolize what was happening. Sometimes even support after the fact.
Now careers disappear almost instantaneously.
An email arrives overnight so you do not see it until morning. Then access vanishes immediately. Badges stop working. Years of accumulated rhythm collapse into a single morning.
The language around these “events” has also become strangely antiseptic. Reduction in force. Organizational realignment. And perhaps the most cryptic of all: Business Update.
What those emails never capture is the scale of what disappears with them.
Income, of course. But also rhythm, community, shared language, shared pressure. The daily interactions that made difficult work survivable. The person who messaged you during impossible meetings just to check whether you were okay.
For me, the strangest part after the job was gone was the empty calendar sitting where a professional life used to be. For weeks afterward I kept looking for meetings, events, anything I could fill it with, overwhelming myself once again as a way of not having to feel what had actually happened.
There is also the loss of witnessing.
The people who understood your shorthand because they had lived inside the same machinery long enough to recognize the emotional weather patterns before they fully formed. Who were present for the decisions made under pressure, the compromises, the work that mattered and the work that did not. They could testify to a version of your life that no longer had a structure holding it together.
And then comes the job search, lately one of the most humbling and psychologically disorienting experiences of all.
People who once could find work within days suddenly find themselves confronting a market that no longer seems to recognize them. You take twenty years of accumulated experience and expertise and compress it into documents optimized for systems that may never encounter you as a human being.
You rewrite yourself in increasingly optimized language, trying to sound current without sounding desperate, experienced without sounding dated, capable without sounding too senior, assertive without sounding difficult.
Then you are told the CV itself is no longer sufficient. You now need a portfolio, “artifacts” of your own making. More work to demonstrate the work you have already been doing for twenty years.
And while searching for a role while still grieving the last one, underneath it all sits a fear that many professionals rarely admit openly: the fear that their expertise is expiring in real time. That the world they mastered is moving on without them and that by the time they return, should they ever be so lucky, the system will no longer recognize what they know.
I understand intellectually that companies do not owe loyalty. Most professionals do. We know organizations optimize for economics, shareholder expectations, and strategic shifts. We know the employment relationship is not familial, no matter how much corporate language occasionally pretends otherwise.
And still.
There is something profoundly disorienting about realizing that the years and the parts of yourself repeatedly sacrificed to keep the machinery functioning were never weighed in the way some deeper part of you believed they would be.
That realization leaves a wound many highly competent people feel ashamed to admit exists at all, as though caring deeply about work were itself some embarrassing misunderstanding of the contract.
But grief does not care whether the contract technically warned you.
There is also a professional grief I did not anticipate: the grief of the future that will now not happen.
Work carries implicit trajectories. Whatever you were building would have continued to become something. The version of yourself growing inside that institution believed there would be a next chapter. When the institution ended, it took that chapter too.
You grieve it even if deep down you might not have wanted it, because the decision not to want it was never fully yours.
The loss still lands.
Which brings me back to the hives.
I do not think my body was reacting only to one meeting, or one executive, or the cursing. I think it was reacting to years of things swallowed whole.
Those humiliations, betrayals, emergencies, and impossible meetings continue living somewhere in the nervous system long after the org chart has moved on.
You cannot fire them.
I want to be careful not to turn this into a healing arc.
There will eventually be healing. But this essay is not about that.
My goal here is simpler: to give professional grief, even if only for the length of this essay, the dignity of mourning.
To name it.
What I can say with certainty is that the grief you have been carrying without language is not weakness, nor something to be embarrassed by. It is the accurate response to real hurt and real loss, most of it endured without any sanctioned moment to stop and acknowledge what was actually happening.
We do not have funerals for careers.
We do not have ceremonies for the day the badge stopped working.
We do not have rituals for the version of yourself that once had a place on the org chart and now does not.
And we certainly do not have rituals for the pre-grief, the slow accumulation of wrongness that precedes the official ending by months or years.
What we have instead is the pressure to become resilient before we have even fully registered what hurt.
But some things need to be fully felt before they can be left behind.
The years we gave. The loyalty that was real even if it was not returned. The moment your honest uncertainty cost you everything. The future that ended without ceremony. The colleagues who disappeared from the calendar and the way their absence restructured your days.
You cared about the work.
About the people.
About what you were building.
The wound is proof of that. And that is what makes professional grief so difficult to carry: the losses are often invisible, but the attachment was real.
Some of my grief has settled. Some of it I am finding language for, even in the writing of this essay. And language changes the shape of a thing. It makes it holdable in a different way.
But some of it still surfaces unexpectedly. In the hives. In the way my body tightens before I tell certain stories or feels exhausted after I tell them.
At some point, in your own time, you will begin to feel better. You will find yourself again underneath all the adaptation. But it will not happen on anyone else’s timeline.
The crossing starts with naming the grief you are actually feeling. With acknowledging that it is truly there. With accepting that grief, including professional grief, does not need to become wisdom immediately, or perhaps even ever.
We are allowed to let it be grief for a while.
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Mariangela Zanchetta is a global strategy, product, and operations executive with 20+ years driving transformation across Fortune 100 technology companies, including Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft. A recognized 0→1 builder and trusted advisor to the C-suite, she has shaped multicloud strategy, developer ecosystems, and compliance automation at global scale.
She writes the newsletter Between Worlds, exploring the threshold moments where identity, ambition, and reinvention intersect in modern careers.
Fluent in Italian, German, and Spanish, she brings the same curiosity to leadership that she brings to food, travel, and connection.
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