Becoming | 1: How I Lost My Job at the CDC and Found My Imagination

I knew my last day was coming when I opened my email and saw the subject line: “A few programs will be cut due to the recession of funds.”

And I thought… Ah yes, the CDC — where we prevent the spread of disease but not the spread of layoffs.

There it was: my polite, bureaucratic breakup letter, dressed in government jargon. I read it twice, half-expecting a CDC-style “guidance document” attached — Steps to Emotionally Prepare for Unemployment (Updated Weekly).

Spoiler: there wasn’t one.

And to add fuel to the proverbial fire, I was newly forty, raising a three-year-old who was born in the middle of the pandemic — because apparently, I like my major life transitions served with a side of global crisis. Another wise choice of mine.

By 2023, I thought I’d finally found my footing again. I was working full-time — but as a contractor — at the CDC, building a program to help virologists and epidemiologists translate their data into stories. The goal was to make accurate, digestible, human information for the public. Basically, I was teaching scientists how to speak “normal person.”

And just as it was starting to work — bam — gone. Budget cuts. Contract canceled. The plug pulled quietly — and suddenly, everything I’d built was just… gone.

I just stared at the screen, stunned. After everything we’ve been through, this is what gets cut? Logic rarely wins in government budgeting, so I closed my laptop, turned on Real Housewives, and began a deep dive into both the reunion drama and the question of what the hell I was doing with my life.

Because maybe this was it — the forced pause I didn’t know I needed. The moment to stop explaining data and start designing something of my own.

That email didn’t just end a job; it began an experiment. Not a controlled one, but the messy kind — part career reinvention, part identity crisis, part finger painting with a toddler while Googling “how to start over creatively at 40.”

And somehow, in that chaos, a new kind of purpose started to grow.

Next time: how green smoothies, meditation, magic, long walks, and one honest lunch with a friend helped me figure out where I was really headed.