I got fired on a Tuesday.
Not laid off. Not restructured. Not caught in some company-wide reduction in force.
Fired.
Even now, years later, that word still lands differently.
For twenty-five years, I had built a career that most people would have considered successful. I was a nurse who became an executive. I earned my MBA at twenty-four years old. I led hospitals. Opened facilities. Built teams. Sat at tables I once only dreamed of sitting at. During COVID, my teams maintained retention rates most organizations would have killed for. We delivered quality outcomes, financial outcomes, growth outcomes.
I wasn’t perfect. But I was good at what I did. Very good. Which is why being fired didn’t just cost me a job. It shattered my identity.
The strange thing about getting fired is that everyone assumes you’ll feel one thing. Sad or Angry or Relieved or Embarrassed or frustrated or scared. Pick one. But that’s not how it works.
Human emotions are rarely neat enough to fit inside a single box. The reality is that getting fired is often a masterclass in contradictory emotions. You can be devastated at the loss and relieved to be out of a terrible environment. Humiliated about what people might think and hopeful about new opportunities and a different path. Terrified about not having the security of a paycheck and benefits and incredibly excited about a new path. Scared to death about the unknown that lies ahead and somehow rejuvenated by the idea of starting fresh, while also really pissed off that you’re having to. Angry about the way things went down and yet grateful to be free!
My point here is that the range of contradictory thoughts and emotions are seemingly endless and to make them even more challenging to navigate and understand, they’re all happening at the exact same time.
For months after losing my job, I felt like I was carrying around emotional whiplash. One moment I was furious. Furious that after years of sacrifice, loyalty, and results, my career had been reduced to a cardboard box sitting on my front porch. Or in my personal case, a giant black and yellow plastic container with a Post-It note reading “vaginal speculums”, can’t make this shit up. I mean I did run hospitals but still!
Furious that the same people who once praised my leadership now acted as if I had never existed. Furious that insecure leaders and workplace politics had somehow beaten performance, integrity, and truth.
If you’ve lived through something similar, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You replay every meeting. Every conversation. Every warning sign. Every betrayal.
You become a detective investigating the crime scene of your own career. You try to figure out how you went from top performer to target. How the person with the seat at the table suddenly became the problem. And if we’re being honest? There’s often another emotion lurking beneath the anger. Humiliation.
Nobody likes talking about that one. Humiliation feels ugly. It feels vulnerable. It feels weak. But it isn’t. Because no matter how unfair the situation may have been, getting fired forces you to confront the stories you tell yourself about your own worth.
I remember wondering what people would think. What former colleagues would say. Whether people believed the narrative that had been created about me. Whether everything I had built was now somehow erased.
It’s amazing how quickly a job can become tangled up with your identity. Until suddenly the title disappears and you’re left staring at yourself in the mirror wondering who you are without it. For me, it was Allie, CEO to Allie unemployed overnight.
Then came the fear. Not the motivational Instagram kind of fear. The real kind. The 3 a.m. kind. The kind that wakes you up, calculating how long your savings will last. The kind that wonders how you’ll replace healthcare benefits. The kind that asks whether you’ve made a terrible mistake betting on yourself. The kind that reminds you every two weeks that a paycheck is no longer arriving.
People love talking about reinvention. Very few people talk about how terrifying reinvention actually feels while you’re living it. As a single mom with no external means of support, multiply that time a gazillion. How was I going to support AJ and me? That’s fear like no other.
But somewhere in the middle of all those emotions, another feeling started showing up. One I didn’t expect. Excitement. Not loud excitement. Not confident excitement. A quiet excitement. A whisper. A possibility.
Because once the shock began wearing off, I started realizing something. The people who fired me hadn’t actually won. At least not in the way I initially thought. For months, I viewed the situation as a competition. The mean girls won. The politics won. The insecurity won. The bullies won.
But eventually I realized something that changed everything. If I were truly the person they worked so hard to push out, then losing me wasn’t my loss. It was theirs. They lost the executive who consistently delivered results. They lost the leader who challenged assumptions. They lost the person willing to tell the truth in rooms where truth had become increasingly uncomfortable. They lost someone who genuinely cared. And perhaps most importantly, they lost access to everything I would accomplish next.
Because while they were busy protecting their power, I was busy discovering mine. That’s the part nobody tells you. Sometimes the worst day of your career becomes the first day of your life. Not immediately. Not magically. Not without tears, therapy, doubt, and a ridiculous number of panic attacks.
But eventually. The moment you stop asking why this happened to me and start asking what I can build from here, everything begins to change. That’s the power of the “and.”
You can mourn what was lost and be excited about what’s next. You can feel betrayed and still believe in people. You can be scared and still move forward. You can acknowledge that getting fired was one of the most painful experiences of your life and recognize that it may have been the catalyst for becoming the person you were always meant to be.
The goal isn’t to choose one emotion. The goal is to allow them all to exist. Because healing isn’t found in pretending you’re okay. Healing is found in accepting that you are simultaneously broken-hearted and hopeful. Angry and grateful. Terrified and determined.
And eventually, something remarkable happens. You stop looking backward. You stop obsessing over what they did. You stop trying to win a game you no longer want to play. And instead, you start building. Building a career on your terms. Building a life aligned with your values. Building boundaries you once ignored. Building confidence that no title can give and no employer can take away.
That’s exactly why I created The Unfiltered Leader. Not because I have all the answers. But because I’ve lived the questions. I’ve sat on the floor surrounded by uncertainty wondering what came next. I’ve questioned my worth. I’ve rebuilt my confidence from scratch.
I’ve learned how to stop shrinking, stop seeking permission, and start leading from a place of clarity and conviction.
The women who join The Unfiltered Leader aren’t looking for another leadership course. They’re looking for themselves. They’re looking for the version of them that existed before toxic workplaces convinced them they were too much. Too loud. Too ambitious. Too disruptive. Too threatening. They’re looking for the woman they used to be before survival became their full-time job.
And if that’s where you find yourself right now—standing in the rubble of a career you didn’t expect to lose—I want you to know something. This chapter is not proof that you failed. It’s proof that your story isn’t finished.
Because sometimes the most powerful word in your entire journey isn’t “but.” It’s “and.” You were fired. And you’re still standing. You were betrayed. And you’re still building. You are scared. And you’re moving forward anyway. And that changes everything.
