Entry 004: Starting Over After 40

"They don't tell you that redundancy can be a gift wrapped in fear."

May 2025. A meeting appears in my calendar. No agenda. Just a time slot on a Friday afternoon.

Part of me already knew.

For weeks, they'd been pulling work away. Excluding me from meetings. Messages going unanswered. That particular brand of workplace ghosting where you still show up but slowly become invisible. The toxic fade-out before the final cut.

Fifteen minutes on Zoom. I don't remember the exact wording, except for "effective immediately." Those two words are branded into memory. Everything else is a blur.

The strange thing? Until that very moment, I still held onto hope. Maybe they'd find another role for me. Maybe things would shift. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Even through the toxic dissonance, even as they made me invisible, I clung to the familiar pain rather than face the unknown.

I'm not sure why we do this. Hold onto something even when it's poisoning us, until all the cards come tumbling down.

Five minutes after the call ended, I was digitally erased. Every login revoked. Every channel closed. Three years vanished between whatever they said and the blank screen that followed.

The Unwrapping

I thought I'd always be a writer. That's where I assumed this path would lead.

I even started a blog and a newsletter. The writing, literally (excuse the pun), was on the wall.

But the first weeks after the layoff, I couldn't write anything. Not a word. My hands, my mind, felt sapped. The dining room table—the same one where I'd coordinated 100 transcriptionists across continents—sat empty.

About a month in, Mum made me a desk pad. Handmade, simple, the kind that shows someone believes in your dreams even when you can't see them yourself.

But it wasn't words that came first. It was scribbles. Then doodles. Then sketches. Little marks that slowly became something more.

Week by week, patterns emerged. Not just on paper, but in understanding: I remembered all the doodles in my textbook margins, how drawing always came more naturally to me than words. Every spiral during work meetings, every moment my hand reached for pen and paper in our digital world—analog had always been whispering. I just hadn't been listening.

This wasn't the writing path I'd imagined. This was something else entirely—a return to what had always been there, waiting in the margins.

Ink, not words, became my language.

Starting From Not-Scratch

After forty, starting over means knowing that scratch isn't really scratch.

The attention to detail that caught transcript errors now catches the subtle weight of each line. The patience built from managing global teams serves the slow accumulation of marks. The systems thinking that optimized workflows now helps me see how circles build into worlds.

Every morning starts differently now. Not with Slack notifications or timezone calculations, but with ink meeting paper. The protective board I bought for our dining room table isn't for laptops anymore—it's for the deliberate practice of mark-making.

I'm learning that twenty years of pivoting wasn't wasted motion. From baby products to hospitality, from safari logistics to legal operations—each role taught me something I'd need now. How to see patterns. How to manage chaos. How to trust the process even when the outcome isn't clear.

The Architecture of New Days

The mortgage still needs paying. Bills arrive monthly. Pets need feeding. But the architecture of my days has transformed entirely.

Where anxiety once lived, curiosity grows. Where optimization ruled, intuition guides. Where I once made myself invisible through competence, I now make myself deliberately present in every mark.

Friends ask if I miss the stability. The regular paycheck. The familiar rhythm of corporate life.

What I tell them: I wake up eager now. Not to check emails but to see where yesterday's ink may lead today. Not to manage metrics but to discover what patterns want to emerge. Not to prove my worth through data but to create worth that can't be measured in spreadsheets.

The same table where they told me location mattered is now where I create work that transcends geography entirely. Each piece begins here, in South Africa, and finds homes across continents. The irony isn't lost on me.

What Redundancy Teaches

They don't tell you redundancy can be a gift because most people never unwrap it. They rush to find the same box with a different label. Another role. Another company. Another three years of slowly disappearing into someone else's systems.

But sometimes a Friday afternoon ambush is exactly what you need.

To stop asking permission.

To stop optimizing someone else's dreams.

To stop believing that forty is "too late" to start.

To stop holding onto what's hurting you.

I think about that desk pad Mum made me, how it arrived when I thought the path led to words but instead opened a door to ink. About all the circles I've drawn since. About how starting over after forty means finally understanding that every ending carries instructions for the next beginning.

You just have to be brave enough to read them.

And patient enough to let them emerge, circle by circle, line by line.