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 my job the way anyone does after too many years slogging away in the corporate 9–5, longing for something more but too polite to admit it. So I did what any decent Australian would do: kept making coffee, smiled through the monotony, and quietly dissociated while my inner voice screamed in agony.

So when my company sat me down and said, “We’re making your role redundant…”
That inner voice inside whispered, “Oh, thank God.”

From the outside, I nodded like a responsible adult who totally had his life together.
On the inside? A tiny version of me doing backflips, screaming:
“WE’RE FREE, WE’RE FREE!”
Of course, the dread and embarrassment kicked in soon after. I’d never been made redundant before, and as I sat in that painfully polite meeting, I couldn’t help but notice how awkward everyone seemed. All of us pretending to be professional while silently wishing the earth would swallow us whole.

For 15 years, I’d been a loyal IT corporate zombie. I answered emails, processed requests, solved problems, ran projects, and survived many Christmas parties (just). I attended meetings that could’ve been a text. I wrote documentation that no one, including me, ever read.
And the whole time, there was a small voice inside me saying:
“Mate… you are supposed to be doing something else.”

I ignored that voice. Why? Because bills. Because kids. Because stability. Because being a grown-up means slowly murdering your dreams, right?
Looking back now, I catch myself wondering: Was I ever actually interested in what I was doing in my profession? It feels like I’ve spent most of my life doing what was expected. Ticking boxes, following the script, nodding along with the phrase etched in my mind, “that’s just the way it’s done.”
Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of what I actually wanted, though I don’t think I’ve ever really known what it is I actually wanted. I feel like I wear a lot of masks to “fit in”. For those Myers-Briggs fans playing along at home, I’m an INFJ, which apparently is a common trait for INFJs to wear masks and lose a sense of identity. I don’t necessarily believe in all that stuff. The first time I read about it, it made sense of my entire personality. But that’s a story for another time.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been good at observing people. Reading rooms. Adapting. I can pick up on body language, tone, all that unspoken stuff, and then blend in. That made me great at fitting into places, but terrible at figuring out who I was beneath all that camouflage. I think that’s probably how I survived doing things for so long.

Anyway, back to that voice, the one saying I was supposed to be doing something else, but I was only half listening to it (something many wives likely experience when talking to their husbands).

After a health scare a few years earlier, I’d already started questioning what I was doing in corporate life. The time away from work had made me really reflect on who I was and what I wanted to do. I still dreamt of writing and making movies or anime, anything to get my stories out. I couldn’t figure out how to transition. Until it would seem the universe decided I was taking too long to act. So, one day, it decided:
“Yeah, nah, time to yeet this man into his actual life.”
So here I am.
Unemployed. Terrified. Yet… oddly happy.
It’s like life handed me a blank page and said, “Start over and write something from the heart.”
And this is why you might find yourself here now, reading this. That you have clicked on my little slice of the world out of curiosity. (Or you lost a bet. Both valid ways to end up here.)

I have no idea where this leads, but for once, I’m choosing the path that feels like me, instead of the one that looks “proper” on LinkedIn.

Now, hold on to your hat, dear reader, as I’m about to take a sharp turn in this post and take you on a personal spiritual experience I had.
Let me explain, because this next part might sound a bit… out there. (Spoiler alert: it is.)
A few months before the redundancy, I started leaning toward the more metaphysical side of things. Not because I was chasing enlightenment, but because I was lost. I was searching for something to help me make sense of my life.
To be clear, I’d never been that guy. I didn’t meditate. I didn’t pull Tarot cards. I didn’t think about synchronicities. I was the person who was aware of it, but I would never actively engage in it.

But I’d hit a point where logic wasn’t cutting it anymore. So, for once, I stopped critiquing everything and decided to just…let it all in. No judgment on any method to seek understanding of oneself.

I watched a YouTube video on how to meditate. After a few nights, I noticed the slight calm it brought. Around that same time, I started noticing patterns: 444, 555, 1111, over and over. Clocks, license plates, building signs. I’d seen them often enough to go from “weird coincidence” to “okay, what’s the deal?”
Then came a suggested video in my algorithm: “How to Contact Your Spirit Guides.”
The presenter looked like Doc Brown from Back to the Future (which immediately won me over. The movie’s a masterpiece, and if I’d listen to anyone, it’d be the Doc. He built a time machine out of a DeLorean for Pete’s sake! Surely he could help me) He talked about Jungian concepts and creating a “mental sanctuary”, a place in your mind where you could invite your guides during meditation.

It sounded ridiculous. So naturally, I had to try it.
That night, I built that place in my head. What I built is the same one you see on the homepage of this site. A quiet garden. Stone paths. A wooden bench beside rectangular ponds of water. It felt peaceful, timeless.
I sat on the bench, whispered the mantra the Temu Doc Brown suggested and waited. I expected nothing.

Then… something happened.

You know that feeling when someone’s about to walk into the room? You haven’t seen them yet, but you can feel them there. About to enter. That’s what it was like. A presence. Waiting close by. Then a strange physical sensation struck. A wave of warm pain rising from the base of my spine, up through my back, through my neck, and finally to the top of my head, where it settled like a tight pressure. My head throbbed like I’ve never felt before, kind of like hanging upside down when all the blood rushed to your head. But I was seated comfortably, so it made no sense.
And then, suddenly, my father was sitting beside me. My father, who has been passed for a good sixteen years now.

I won’t go into every detail spoken in that experience, between a father and his son; some things feel sacred to keep, and maybe in another post, I will go further into it, but I can tell you this: I cried like a newborn. It was raw, overwhelming, but a beautiful experience.

At one point, I asked him to help me, to guide me. Anything. Help me figure out what to do with my life. He didn’t speak. He just smiled. In flashes, I saw an image of a pen, then a pad, then a bridge.

Write.
That was the message I got from him, though it was unspoken. In my mind, I’m asking him, “You want me to write?" He nodded. And when I queried the bridge, I threw several suggestions out as to what the bridge symbolised. He nodded to them all. And when I finally suggested a thought along the lines of, “Is the pen and pad the bridge from my mind to the masses?” He gave a thumbs-up.
And now. Here I am. Embarking on something I had always wanted to do. And it only took losing my job and having an impactful spiritual experience with a dead parent to get there. And don’t worry, if you’re reading this and thinking “okay, this guy is nuts”, I’m right there with you. If someone had told me this story, I would be telling my friends, “I think old mate has finally lost it”. But. It did happen. I can’t explain it. I’ll write another blog on some of the experiences I’ve had since in my “mind Garden” that made me completely question some very odd happenings, and if I am indeed losing my mind. There have been just too many coincidences to ignore.

So, as I draw this blog post to an end, I guess some thoughts to take away. If you’d told me six months ago that unemployment, meditation, and a ghostly pep talk from Dad would set me on a new path, I’d have laughed you out of the office. But here we are. Redundant, reborn, and slightly unhinged. Now, if you came across this post as you have just been made redundant yourself, know this. The decision is not based on who you are as a person or your value as a person. Redundancies are something companies conduct in an effort to try and save money and move in a new direction. You will experience a range of emotions from anger to embarrassment. It sucks, and to be honest, we will probably see more happen over the next few years with AI’s accelerated growth. But just know, it is not the end. And maybe, in some oddly cosmic way, there’s more purpose to it. More purpose for you. To realign with what you are intended to do. And what you value in life.
And as for the spiritual stuff, I can’t explain it, but I will touch on more of what I’ve learned and experienced in future posts. But take it from a critical person of such things, does it really matter what you find that betters you as a person? Be it religious, spiritual, a concept, or anything that is not considered “normal”. If it is something that allows you to better understand yourself and allows your inner voice to shine, I can’t find a reason to critique that. Because I can tell you now from experience, you can only put off your true calling for so long.

Maybe that’s what life does when you ignore it for too long. It eventually throws you out of your comfort zone and hands you back the thing you were always meant to hold. For me, it was a pen, a page and my thoughts.
I don’t know where this new road leads, and honestly, I’m okay with that. Because for the first time in a long time, it feels like I’m finally doing something that I wanted to do. And it will be a process, and will take time to perfect, but like my old pal Doc Brown said:

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