De-Hyphenating Myself
The Journey of Finding My Own Resilience | Chapter 1
Today marks one year since the day my career, as I had known it for eleven years, came to an abrupt end. I have been thinking about how to tell this story, and I keep arriving at the same conclusion: tell it honestly. The fear. The dark mornings. The small moments that held everything together. And the unexpected grace of discovering who you actually are when the scaffolding is gone.
This is that story.
The Announcement
I had been hearing whispers on Blind for weeks. Something was coming. Still, when the meeting invite landed in my calendar that Tuesday morning in May, labelled simply “Important Business Update,” something in my stomach went cold.
I was at the Microsoft office in Burlington, Massachusetts. A quiet day. Not many people around. I reached out to teammates mostly remote colleagues. Some had received the same invite. I messaged my manager. He had it too. The consensus was : “If you received that invite, it is not good news.”
I had thirty minutes.
There is a particular kind of dread that comes from knowing what is coming and having to sit with it anyway. I think of it now as a sentencing. You know the verdict before the gavel falls. The call itself confirmed everything: the CVP and HR spoke on the line. No cameras allowed. No chat enabled. Just voices, delivering the news of role elimination without warmth, without acknowledgment of who was on the other end. Eleven years, reduced to an organizational adjustment, a line item in a SpreadSheet.
After the call, I spoke with my skip-level, then my manager, then a few long-term colleagues. The office was quiet. I was largely alone with it. The weight of it settled in slowly, the way bad news always does when there is no one to react with you in the same room.
The Last Post
Before I left the office that day, I sat down and wrote. I needed to say something while I still could, while the rawness of the moment was still honest. I opened LinkedIn and typed what was true:
“Your name gets hyphenated with the organization: Ashish Bhatia, Product Manager at Microsoft. And then, an event like today’s suddenly severs you from that anchor point. It is not just a job ending. It feels like losing a part of yourself.”
I ended the post with a line that surprised me as I wrote it:
“It is time for me to de-hyphenate myself.”
What happened next still moves me. Within hours, hundreds of people responded. Colleagues I had built things with. Strangers I had never met. People offering connections, referrals, encouragement, and simply their presence in a moment of grief. The community I had invested in over years showed up immediately. I would later have to hand my phone to my son and ask him to thank people on my behalf and triage for me, who had a concrete lead to share.
But that was later. In that moment, I looked around the office one last time.
On the cubicle wall outside my desk, in my own handwriting, two yellow post-its:
“My Road ends Here.”
“Good bye.”
I grabbed my things and walked out of the building where I had first arrived as a Nokia employee over a decade earlier, before Microsoft’s acquisition. I would not be returning as an employee.
The Drive Home
My hands were shaking on the steering wheel. My mind kept circling the same thought: my stay in this country depends on my job. That job no longer exists. Everything we had built here, our home, our life, the place we called Home, was now in question.
When my wife and son came home from school, I gathered them at the dining table. When I began to speak, they thought someone in the family had died. In a way, something had. I explained what had happened and what it meant for all of us. We held hands around the table.
My son looked at me and said: “Dad, don’t settle for less. You are worth way more than Microsoft ever gave you credit for.”
I promised them we would fight through this together.
The Evening
I told my family I needed to go to a local AI networking event that night. AI Woodstack, hosted by Paul Baier. Part of me had no business being there. The other part understood clearly: networking was the only real path forward, and sitting alone at home with the weight of the day would not help me or my family.
I drove to the event. I told a few close people in the room what had happened that afternoon. Most did not know. I was there, present, moving, connecting. It was the first act of resilience, even if I did not think of it that way at the time. I was simply refusing to stop.
The FedEx Counter
Microsoft asked us to return our equipment. The Friday of that first week, I spent rest of the week finalizing my resume, sending it to friends, responding to the recruiter messages that had already started coming in. I could no longer access the Microsoft building. I was home all day, mostly alone, backing up personal files, immigration documents, a decade of a digital life.
On Friday I drove to a FedEx counter inside a Staples store.
The woman there told me she had never shipped a laptop before. She did not have the right sized box. I found the smallest one that would fit. I wrapped everything carefully in bubble wrap. And then I wrote a note to the admin in Seattle who had supported our team for years:
“Thank you for handling this last shipment from me. Love from Ashish.”
I sealed the box and pasted the shipping label. I handed it back to her and walked out to the parking lot.
My shoulders felt lighter. I cannot fully explain it, and its to comprehend. The badge, the corporate card, the stickers, the machine I had built things on for years. All of it, boxed and shipped and gone. And something in me felt, for the first time since Monday, like I could breathe.
There was a monster of uncertainty ahead of me. But the task was now clear.
Survive or perish.
Next: Chapter II, The 120-Day Clock. When survival has a deadline, and the dark days that followed before the fight came back.
Ashish - unfortunately, too many of us can understand the exact version of dread you must have felt. Really well written account. I look forward to reading the next part of your story!
Brave post. Clarifying and refreshing.