How Losing My Job (And Trying Meditation) Became the Plot Twist I Needed

I didn't hate my job.

Okay. That's a lie. I hated it the way anyone does after too many years in corporate life — quietly, politely, while making another coffee and wondering if this was really it.

So when my company sat me down and said, "We're making your role redundant…"

That little voice inside me whispered: Oh, thank God.

From the outside, I nodded like a responsible adult who had his life together.

On the inside? A tiny version of me doing backflips, screaming: WE'RE FREE. WE'RE FREE.

Of course, dread kicked in pretty fast after that. I'd never been made redundant before, and as I sat through that painfully polite meeting, I noticed how awkward everyone seemed. All of us pretending to be professional while quietly wishing the earth would swallow us whole..

For fifteen years, I'd been a loyal corporate IT zombie. I attended meetings that could've been emails. I wrote documentation nobody read, including me. I solved problems, ran projects, and survived more Christmas parties than any one person should have to. The whole time, a quiet little voice was sitting in the back of my mind going:
Mate. You're supposed to be doing something else.

I ignored it. Bills. Kids. Stability. You know how it goes.

Looking back now, I genuinely wonder if I was ever interested in what I was doing. I think I spent most of my adult life doing what was expected — ticking boxes, following the script, nodding along to that's just the way it's done. For those playing along on the Myers-Briggs front, I'm an INFJ. Apparently, losing your sense of identity while blending into your environment is a classic INFJ thing. The first time I read about it, it explained my entire personality. But that's a story for another time.

I've always been good at reading rooms. Picking up tone, body language, unspoken tension. It made me great at fitting in — and terrible at figuring out who I actually was beneath all that camouflage. I think that's probably how I survived doing it for so long.

Anyway. Back to that voice.

A few years before the redundancy, a health scare had already made me start questioning things. Time away from work has a funny way of forcing you to look at your own life. I still dreamed of writing, of making movies, of getting my stories out somehow. I just couldn't figure out how to get there.

It seems the universe got tired of waiting for me to figure it out.

Yeah, nah. Time to yeet this man into his actual life.

So here I am. Unemployed. Terrified. And… oddly… happy.

It feels like life handed me a blank page and said: Start over. Write something real this time.

Now hold on. I'm about to make a sharp left turn, because this post isn't just about redundancy. It's about what happened a few months before it — and it's going to sound a bit out there.

(Spoiler: it is.)

I'd started drifting toward the metaphysical. Not out of spiritual ambition — just desperation. Logic wasn't cutting it anymore. I was lost and searching for something, anything, to make sense of where I was in my life.

To be clear: I had never been that guy. No meditation. No tarot. No synchronicities. I was aware it all existed, the same way I'm aware competitive eating is a sport. Not something I'd personally pursue.

But I'd hit a wall. So for once, I stopped critiquing and just let it in.

I started watching YouTube videos on meditation. After a few nights, something did shift, a subtle, quiet calm I hadn't felt in a long time. Around the same time, I started noticing number patterns: 444, 555, 1111. Clocks, licence plates, building signs. Enough times that I went from weird coincidence to okay, what's actually going on here.

Then my algorithm served me up: "How to Contact Your Spirit Guides."

The presenter looked exactly like Doc Brown from Back to the Future, which immediately won me over. I mean — the man built a time machine out of a DeLorean. I'll hear him out. He talked about Jungian concepts and building a "mental sanctuary" — a place in your mind where you could invite your guides during meditation.

It sounded completely ridiculous. So naturally, I had to try it.

That night, I built the place in my head. A quiet garden. Stone paths. A wooden bench beside still, rectangular ponds of water. Peaceful. Timeless. (It's the same place you see on the homepage of this website, actually.)

I sat down on the bench. I whispered the mantra Doc Brown had suggested. I waited. I expected absolutely nothing.

And then something happened.

You know that feeling when someone's about to walk into the room and you haven't seen them yet, but you feel them there? That's what it was. A presence. Close by. Waiting.

Then came a strange physical sensation, a wave of warm pressure rising from the base of my spine, up through my back, through my neck, and settling at the top of my skull like a tight, throbbing weight. Like all the blood had rushed to my head, except I was sitting perfectly still.

And then my father was sitting beside me on the bench.

My father, who passed sixteen years ago.

I won't share everything from that experience. Some things feel too sacred. But I'll tell you this: I cried like a newborn. Raw, overwhelming, and somehow beautiful all at once.

At one point, I asked him to help me. To guide me. I asked him what I was supposed to do.

He didn't speak. He just smiled. And in flashes, I saw: a pen. A notepad. A bridge.

Write.

That was the message , unspoken but unmistakable. I asked, "You want me to write?" He nodded. When I pressed about the bridge, he nodded to almost everything I suggested, until I landed on: "Is the pen and page the bridge, from my mind to the world?"

Thumbs up.

And now. Here I am.

I want to be clear, if someone had told me this story, I'd have quietly texted my friends: I think old mate's finally lost it. I get it. I'm right there with you. But it happened. And I can't un-know it. I'll write more about the experiences in my "mind garden" that followed, because some of them genuinely made me question whether I was losing my mind. There have been too many coincidences to simply write off.

So. If you've just been made redundant yourself and somehow stumbled here, know this: it is not a reflection of your worth. Redundancies are a business decision. They always will be. You'll feel embarrassed, angry, untethered. That's okay. It genuinely sucks. And with AI accelerating the way it is, we'll probably see a lot more of it.

But it is not the end.

Maybe, in some oddly cosmic way, it's a realignment.

As for the spiritual stuff: I can't explain it, and I'm not asking you to believe it. But as someone who spent most of his life deeply skeptical of all of it, I'll say this: does it really matter what method helps you understand yourself better? If it's religion, spirituality, therapy, a concept, a community, if it genuinely brings your inner voice closer to the surface, I can't find a reason to dismiss that.

Because I know from experience, you can only ignore your real calling for so long before life starts ignoring your excuses.

Maybe that's what it does when you stop listening. It throws you out of your comfort zone and hands you back the thing you were always supposed to be holding.

For me, it was a pen. A page. And my own thoughts.

I don't know where this road goes. But for the first time in a long time, it feels like mine.

And as my old pal Doc Brown once said:

"When this baby hits 88 miles per hour… you're gonna see some serious shit."