The layoff came on my wife's birthday.

I am a technical writer. Not a programmer. Wife, two kids, parents upstairs. Brown envelopes. No offer waiting. A two-month clock in my head.

What followed was not a comeback montage. It was ATS resumes that looked beautiful and went nowhere. Interviews that piled up and then went quiet. Five websites built with AI I did not fully understand. A crypto dashboard that once made me a dollar and eighty cents in a day. A father who said a man must always have money. And a body that had been keeping its own score.

This is a memoir, written while it was still happening. No guru timeline. No promise that side projects replace a paycheck.

If you have just been laid off — or you can feel it coming — this is the version nobody puts on LinkedIn.