Choosing Integrity, One Year Later

A year ago yesterday, my professional world was shattered.

There’s no dramatic way to dress that up. A routine request. A meeting I believed was ordinary. And then—without warning—the ground disappeared beneath me. No explanation. No conversation. Just an ending I didn’t see coming and didn’t understand. One moment I was fully employed, invested, and planning for the future. The next, I was untethered—left holding questions that never received answers.

The year that followed has been anything but simple.

It has been a year of reflection and reckoning. A year of replaying conversations, examining choices, and sitting with discomfort. A year of learning the difference between responsibility and blame, between accountability and shame. A year of grieving not just a job, but the loss of professional identity, stability, and trust in systems I believed would protect the people inside them.

If you’ve ever had something end without explanation—if you’ve ever been told you’re out of alignment without being told how or why—then you know how disorienting that kind of silence can be. It makes you question everything. Not just what happened, but who you are.

And if you’re currently in the trenches of something similar—navigating rejection, rebuilding after loss, or carrying quiet humiliation you don’t know where to put—I want you to know this: I see you. I get it. You’re not weak for struggling. You’re human.

There’s a particular kind of tension that comes from working inside a system that speaks fluently about values while quietly asking you to make peace with inconsistencies. It doesn’t announce itself all at once. It shows up slowly—in moments where your instincts hesitate, where something doesn’t sit right but you tell yourself to keep going, to trust the process, to give it time.

For a long while, I tried to do exactly that.

I believed in accountability. I still do. I believed in doing the work well, owning mistakes, asking hard questions, and being willing to course-correct when necessary. What I struggled with was realizing that accountability isn’t always practiced in the same way it’s preached. And when that gap widens, it creates an internal conflict that’s hard to name—especially if you’re someone who takes your responsibilities seriously.

I spent months asking myself whether the discomfort I felt was a personal failing or a sign that something deeper was off. Was I being too sensitive? Too idealistic? Or was I being asked—quietly, indirectly—to adapt my integrity to fit someone else’s definition of alignment?

That kind of tension doesn’t explode.
It erodes.

It erodes confidence. It erodes trust in your own judgment. And eventually, it forces a reckoning: either you silence your internal compass, or you listen to it and accept whatever consequences follow.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much energy that internal negotiation was costing me. I only know now that when the ending came—sudden and unexplained—it landed on ground that had already been worn thin.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how long the aftermath would last—or how quietly it would follow me into rooms I thought I had already earned the right to stand in.

Job applications have a way of flattening complex human experiences into checkboxes. One of them asks, simply: Have you ever been fired from a job? It’s a binary question with no room for context, no space for process. Just yes or no.

Checking that box felt like swallowing something sharp.

The follow-up question is worse: Please explain. There’s no honest way to answer it when no explanation was ever given to you. Writing “no reason provided” feels inadequate and suspicious at the same time—like an omission, even when it’s the truth.

What makes that answer so difficult is not just the ending—it’s the absence of anything leading up to it.

There were no warnings.
No reprimands.
No written concerns.
No conversations about performance.
No meetings where I was told to course-correct.

Nothing was ever put in my file. Nothing was ever framed as a problem to solve. As far as I knew, everything was fine—until suddenly, it wasn’t. One moment stability existed. The next, it was gone. No transition. No explanation. Just a clean break where continuity should have been.

That reality follows you into interviews.

Sometimes the question comes back around. Sometimes it doesn’t—but you can feel it hovering in the room anyway. And when it does surface, it’s rarely hostile. It’s curious. Careful. A slight tilt of the head. Raised eyebrows. A pause that stretches just long enough to tighten your chest.

You answer calmly. You stick to the facts. You say the same thing you wrote on the application.

No reason was given.

And in that moment, there’s nothing more you can offer. No clarification. No defense. No narrative arc where growth makes everyone comfortable again. Just the tension of being assessed through a silence you didn’t create and couldn’t control.

That’s where the shame sneaks in.

Not because you’ve done something wrong—but because uncertainty has a way of attaching itself to character when process is absent. You feel exposed. You feel diminished. And you realize how destabilizing it is to lose not just a job, but the story that explains how you got from one chapter to the next.

I didn’t expect how many times I would have to relive the ending—not through memory, but through repetition. Through forms. Through interviews. Through moments where professionalism required composure while something inside me quietly braced for judgment.

What I don’t want to do—what I won’t do—is pretend that I handled this well from the beginning.

I didn’t.

When my professional world collapsed, so did my sense of stability. I was angry. I was humiliated. I was disoriented in a way that went far beyond career disappointment. For a long stretch of time, I lived in a state of raw fury—shut down, reactive, and deeply wounded.

What made this loss especially destabilizing was not just the suddenness of it, but the absence of answers. There is something uniquely corrosive about not knowing why. About having no opportunity to course-correct, no chance to respond, no space to be heard. Silence has a way of inviting the worst interpretations, and my mind filled in the gaps relentlessly.

This wasn’t the first time I had experienced something like that.

Earlier in my career, I had already done the painful work of making peace with being the villain in someone else’s story—of having my name questioned, my character misunderstood, and my voice absent from the narrative. I had learned how to live without defending myself, how to accept that I would never get to set the record straight.

So when this happened again—without warning, without explanation, without recourse—it reopened a wound I thought I already knew how to carry.

And that nearly broke me.

I cried. A lot.

I shut people out. I withdrew. Relationships fractured—not as punishment, but as self-protection. I spoke with a lawyer friend of mine, hoping for clarity, for some path forward that made sense. What I learned instead was that there would be no resolution to pursue, no explanation to extract, no story to complete.

That realization—that this, too, would end without answers—sent me into a deeper spiral.

For months, I sat in the wreckage. I wasn’t grounded. I wasn’t resilient. I wasn’t spiritual in any polished way. I was stripped of certainty and left to reckon with who I was when the structures, titles, and narratives I relied on were gone.

What eventually changed wasn’t the story—it was me.

Slowly, and not without resistance, I began doing the harder work of processing what had happened instead of reliving it. Therapy became a lifeline. Faith—quiet, fragile, and honest—met me in places where platitudes never could. I stopped asking how to undo the damage and started asking how to live with it without letting it define me.

That shift didn’t happen all at once. It took time. It took support. It took humility. And it took a willingness to admit how deeply wounded I had been before I could begin to integrate what the experience had cost me.

A year later, I don’t have a neat resolution to offer.

What I do have is distance—and with it, a clarity that only time seems willing to give. Only now am I able to look back with something I couldn’t honestly access before: gratitude.

Not for how things ended, but for what I learned along the way.

I didn’t make the wrong choice by stepping into a different professional chapter. I learned a tremendous amount by making that decision—for better and for worse. I met good people. I gained valuable experience. I grew in ways that continue to shape how I lead, how I listen, and how I move through the world. I’m genuinely grateful for that season, even though it ended painfully.

Being fired taught me even more.

Hard lessons. Unwelcome lessons. Life-altering ones.

It messed with me. It made me question my competence, my judgment, my worth. I replayed everything. I spiraled. And when answers never came, I learned how to endure without them.

It’s only now—with time, distance, and deep internal work—that I can say this without flinching: I’m grateful my world exploded.

Not because it needed to.
Not because it was fair.

But because this past year taught me more about resilience, survival, and God’s presence than anything else in my life.

Every step of the way—especially in the moments when I was angry, bitter, and undone—He was there. Walking beside me. Letting me yell, question, complain, and grieve. And patiently showing me how I was being sustained even when I couldn’t see it yet.

If you’re reading this while still in the thick of it—still stunned, still furious, still replaying the moment where everything changed—I want you to hear this clearly: there is nothing wrong with you. The grief, the shame, the exhaustion, the confusion—they are not signs of weakness. They are signs that something mattered deeply and ended without care.

You don’t need answers yet.
You don’t need gratitude yet.
You don’t need meaning yet.

You just need to keep going.

A year ago, my professional world collapsed. Today, it no longer defines me. What defines me now is the slow, deliberate choice to live with integrity, to tell the truth without venom, and to keep moving forward—even when the path only becomes visible one step at a time.

And if you’re still finding your footing, still learning how to stand again, still carrying a story you didn’t get to finish—I see you. I get it. You’re not alone.