She rages on

One moment, the room holds light; the next, it doesn’t. I feel the same internal shift. I don’t know how to process this.

I refresh Slack, then my email. I note names as they appear in side channels and private messages. I feel the weight of the loss by numbering it. I wonder when my name will be thrown on the scale. This temporary salvation is bittersweet.

This round of layoffs is especially hard. Too many wonderful colleagues have been let go—people I respect, learn from, and trust. Witnessing how much care, intelligence, and heart they bring to their work, day after day, and knowing I’ll no longer work alongside them is devastating.

In a company where the pressure to raise the bar in rooms already crowded with exceptional people is constant, the assumption is that those let go must have fallen short. But that is wrong. None of them failed to meet that standard; many exceeded it. This wasn’t about their abilities, performance, or impact. I search for any reason that might make it make sense, and I can’t find one.

This heartbreak exists outside of work, too, alongside news of violence, of people spun through a system that capitalizes on fear and misinformation. The gravity is incomparable, but the mechanism is similar. Decisions made by a few. Lives reduced to metrics. I’m turning in place, caught between institutions that demand compliance while refusing to offer transparency in return.

Outside, an ice cream truck idles beneath my bedroom balcony. It plays the same thirty-second song on a relentless loop. The tune reminds me of my daughter’s wind-up ballerina jewelry box. I imagine the tiny dancer inside, spun into motion by a hand she never sees, forced to repeat the same rotation until the mechanism fails or the owner loses interest. I feel like her—wound up, spinning, watched to see how many turns before she breaks.

The ice cream truck has been playing its song for ten minutes. I did the math: at least twenty repetitions. Who wants ice cream in this weather? Even California has turned up its collar to the cold. Most kids are in school. I can’t imagine who this truck hopes to snare, apart from my sanity.

I close all the windows, but the sound still fills the room. How easily we’re kept spinning by the governments and companies that profit from our labor. Like the ballerina, we’re fixed in place and set in motion by hands we never see.