How I Rebuilt My Life After Losing Everything in One Month
How losing everything became my greatest win.
2025 was both the best and worst year of my life. It began with a car accident that left me officially disabled. Not long after, my cat nearly died, leaving me with a $4,000 vet bill I had no way to pay. My body was broken, my savings were gone, and I was barely holding myself together.
Then, two weeks before graduation—during finals week, while I was writing my honors thesis and juggling multiple massive projects—the final blow hit: I was laid off from the internship that had promised me full-time employment. My entire world shattered.
I was supposed to be focused on finishing strong, completing my thesis, and crossing the finish line of four years of hard work. Instead, I was managing chronic pain, grieving my cat’s near-death, drowning in debt, and watching my guaranteed future evaporate—all while trying to complete the most demanding academic work of my life.
I had already paid for a study-abroad trip for the summer, confident I would have a job waiting for me. Suddenly, I was staring down that trip with no money, no job, a disabled body, unfinished finals, and no idea what came next.
I could have stayed home and collapsed under the weight of everything. Instead, I pushed through. I finished my thesis, graduated in the top 20, and got on that plane. Everything except food was already paid for, so I went anyway—alone, terrified, and determined.
Those six weeks abroad changed me. I didn’t just see new places; I rediscovered the version of myself buried beneath fear, pain, and disappointment.
When I came home, I stopped waiting for life to happen to me. I left my luxury apartment for something cheaper across town. Then I went downtown, restaurant to restaurant, applying in person until someone finally said yes.
That serving job was brutal. Hours on concrete floors left my back and knees screaming, but I was determined to earn back every dollar I’d lost. I worked overtime despite the pain, pushing through shifts when my body begged me to stop. I needed stability before I could build anything bigger, and I was willing to fight for it.
But I didn’t stop there. Between shifts, I went to every career event I could find. I networked with customers at the restaurant. I reached out to strangers on LinkedIn. I applied to jobs relentlessly. Every day was a tightrope walk between paying my bills, healing my body, and trying to secure the future I wanted.
I had 1.5 years of intern experience and a secret security clearance—credentials that should have made me competitive in Huntsville’s defense industry. But I lacked the one thing that mattered most here: connections.
So many students in this city have family in the DoD, relatives who make phone calls, built-in networks. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and homeschool teacher. My dad was a PGA golf professional. Neither worked in defense, and both lived a state away. I had no safety net, no insider contacts, no one to vouch for me. Just me—alone in Alabama—building every connection from scratch.
The rejections piled up. The silence was constant. My body hurt every day. But I didn’t quit.
And then, at the end of November, everything changed. I didn’t just receive one job offer—I received five. Competitive ones. Offers that paid more than what my friends were earning at the company that had laid me off. And the biggest victory? I landed a UX design position, something I’d always dreamed about but never believed was truly within reach.
If I hadn’t been laid off, I probably would’ve ended up in a job that paid less, doing work I didn’t love, hiding my passion for design to fit into a windowless DevSecOps role I’d settled for out of fear.
Instead, I’m closing this year in a cubicle by a window, at a company where I can be myself—where loving design is an asset, not a liability.
The worst thing that ever happened to me, at the worst possible time, became the catalyst for the life I actually wanted. I just had to keep moving when everything in me—my fear, my pain, my exhaustion—wanted to give up.
