Today’s prompt asks which day I’d relive. I don’t have one. What I have is the opposite — a day I’ve spent years making sure I never have to feel again, and I still haven’t fully managed it.
I don’t need to relive it. I never left it.
It started like nothing. A meeting appeared in the diary with no explanation, which in itself should have been the explanation. Then the ping. Then another ping. You learn to hear the difference between a normal notification sound and one that’s about to end something, and you learn it in real time, mid-flinch, with no warning that today was the day you’d be learning it.
I understood the reasons before anyone finished the sentence. Restructure. Cost. None of it personal — that phrase they always reach for, as if “not personal” makes it land any softer when it’s still your name on the list. I understood it completely and it didn’t matter. Understanding was never going to be the thing that saved me from how it felt.
If I could relive one day, it would have to be the day before. Not to change anything — I couldn’t have changed anything, that’s the part that took the longest to sit with — but just to have it back. One more ordinary day where I didn’t yet know what I apparently was to the people I’d given years to. One more day before the word discarded moved into my chest and started paying rent.
That’s the part nobody puts in the redundancy posts with the nice framing. Not the day itself — the day was just shock, adrenaline, logistics. It’s the year after. The mornings where a LinkedIn notification could put me right back in that room. The guilt that arrived instantly and never showed its paperwork. The shame that wasn’t about anything I’d done, just about what a spreadsheet apparently decided I was. I knew, with total clarity, that none of it was a verdict on my worth. Knowing it and believing it turned out to be two completely different jobs, and only one of them was quick.
So no, I wouldn’t relive that day. I’d relive the one before it, if I got to pick — the version of me who still thought a job title told her something true about her value, blissfully, stupidly intact. That woman got maybe twelve more hours. I’d take them back for her if I could, not for what she’d do differently, but just so she’d have them.
I can’t. So instead: I got up today, cold coffee in hand, still here, still writing, still refusing to let one spreadsheet decide what I’m worth. That’s not a relived day. That’s just a Tuesday. But it’s mine.
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