Open to work

"It's a moment of intense uncertainty. If we can't feel stability, if the economy isn't working for us, then who is it working for?"

I said this to The Wall Street Journal. I said what so many people are feeling quietly, out loud.

Last spring, I was laid off from my communications role at the University of Chicago. My husband was laid off from a digital health startup around the same time. Two careers that supported our family. Gone within weeks of each other.

I'm not sharing this lightly or for sympathy, but to name what so many people are living through. Multiply our experience by tens of thousands and it reveals something deeper: a broad erosion of stability in parts of the labor market that once felt insulated.

I felt this was an urgent and underreported story. I could feel the anxiety permeating within my network. When I tested the idea with peers, the reaction was visceral. "I feel this in my soul," one former colleague told me.

So for the first time in my career, instead of pitching my colleagues, I pitched myself. I wanted to connect a personal story to the larger economic picture and help crystallize what's happening to the professional workforce in real time.

Thank you to Rachel Louise Ensign for her careful, rigorous reporting.

And thank you to David Rand for agreeing to share our experience publicly. There is no one I'd rather navigate life and uncertainty with.

If so many skilled, experienced workers feel this precarious, what does that say about the system we're all operating in, and what needs to change?

And yes, the Rands are open to work.

View this post on LinkedIn.

Read the Wall Street Journal article.