June 2020: The Unraveling

By June, the mask had come off.

Not the physical mask—we were still fighting about those—but the mental one. The mask I had been wearing since my contract started. The mask of capability, of composure. The mask that said, "I'm fine. I've got this."

I didn't.

After months of remote work at Microsoft, I was still spinning. No consistent workflow, no clear support, no in-person context. I was in Zoom meetings all day with coworkers I had met exactly once. I was documenting emergency procedures for a company trying to turn a cruise ship on a dime.

My son was home with me. My wife was working at the hospital—every day a new COVID case, every day a new unknown. Daycare opened, then closed, then opened again. I tried to parent, work, and survive in the same room, at the same desk, inside the same overwhelmed body.

And no one knew. Not even me.

I didn't know I was neurodivergent. I didn't know that the sensory chaos, the unrelenting task-switching, the absence of structure—all of it was pushing me into a shutdown spiral. I just knew I was failing. I knew I was being watched. And I knew I couldn't ask for help without sounding broken.

So I kept going. Until I couldn't.

In June 2020, I was let go.

On paper, it was pandemic restructuring. A contract expired. A cut made. But in my body, it felt like a collapse. Not a job loss—an identity loss. My old strategies didn't work. My new ones hadn't formed. I fell into the void between who I'd been and who I was supposed to become.

Unemployment helped. Pandemic assistance helped. But I still couldn't breathe.

Some days I sat on the porch and stared at the light moving through the trees. Some days I couldn't even get out of bed. Grief from my brother's passing crept back in. I journaled obsessively, trying to pin meaning on days that felt erased by sameness.

I had escaped one system that didn't fit only to fall into another that didn't care.

But I kept writing. And little by little, I started to recognize the threads. I could see the outlines of my own patterns, even if I couldn't name them yet.

I was still in freefall. But I had a pen. And sometimes that's enough.