I Lost My $200K+ Tech Job… and Everything I Thought I Wanted

I thought I had “made it.” Five years into a dream sales career in tech, earning over $200K a year without a college degree, it felt like my life checked all the boxes. But then I got laid off. 

And instead of freaking out and applying to 100 jobs, I decided to treat this as an invitation to start a full-blown creative career break. 

In this first episode, I’m walking you through the emotional unraveling, and the surprising shifts in my body, stress, and creativity that have unfolded in just five months. 

If you’ve ever wondered what a career break can do to your identity, ambition, and sense of possibility, this is the raw, real, behind-the-scenes starting point of my story.

In This Episode:

• What it was like to be a high-earning breadwinner, the lifestyle upgrades I loved, and the downsides that it cost me
• My pattern of shelving my own ideas to work behind the scenes for 7-figure creators 
• The expensive coping ritual I created to escape stress multiple nights a week after work
• The surprising changes that unfolded after my layoff (both mental + physical), and how wildly different my life feels, 5 months in

Let's Connect:

Follow me on Instagram: @alisonkinsey or send me an email: alison@alisonkinsey.com. 

Connect with Alison on LinkedIn.

I also help entrepreneurs and thought leaders launch and grow their podcasts through my boutique podcast editing agency, Podcasting for Creatives. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I had the Sunday scaries. I sat at my desk eight plus hours a day wondering if this was it for my life. I had everything I wanted, but it still felt like something was missing, and that I wasn't completely living and embodying my purpose. This is wild. Hi everyone. Welcome to Real Time Creator. I'm Allison, and I am five months into an unexpected career break. So I'm curious: have you ever spent years of your life chasing success, comfort, money? That was me. And one day I realized I didn't even know what I was striving for anymore. And in this first episode, I'm going to take you through a bit of my story, what my dream job actually looked and felt like behind the scenes, how a layoff is rewiring everything, and the biggest changes I've noticed in just five months in my stress, my body, and my creativity. In case you're wondering what a career break actually can do to your life, because I'm not going to lie, it is pretty magical. Before I got laid off, my life looked pinch me amazing. For over five years, I was the breadwinner of our household. I was working a dreamy sales job in an industry I had so much passion for. And I got to work with the best coworkers, an incredibly visionary and inspiring CEO. So there was a lot of good things here. A typical day in the life meant getting on Zoom calls three to five times a day. I'd get my Papa lipstick on. I pretty much always wore leggings because hello, comfort. And that was a day in the life. Literally, at one time, I talked to Mel Robbins and her team, ginormous universities all over the country, micro influencers, best-selling authors that you would absolutely know, but I can't say their names due to NDAs. Every day was different and there was a ton of variety. I really thrived in that. And my calendar was nearly full every day, Monday through Friday. But I never got sick of talking to people and hearing their stories and hearing their dreams. I made over $200,000 a year without a college degree. And that salary unlocked a life I never could have imagined living, like never in a million years. Even with being able to take international trips, fly first class when I felt like splurging. I was investing in my 401k, buying nice things for myself, going out to dinner multiple nights a week. But guys, I had the Sunday scaries. I sat at my desk eight plus hours a day, wondering if this was it for my life. I had everything I wanted, but it still felt like something was missing and that I wasn't completely living and embodying my purpose. My dream wasn't actually the salary. I think I thought it was at first. It was attaining that dreamy number that could afford me this lifestyle. But no, it was actually creative freedom and spaciousness. That's what I really, really wanted deep down. And as you're listening to this, I'd love to know if any of this resonates. When you look at your corporate life or your creator life, do you honestly feel like you're thriving? Are there pieces of your routine that don't fit the lifestyle you want for yourself? And before we go even deeper into this episode, I want to share more about who I am, especially if you're new here and we haven't met yet. So, first of all, I am a wife. My husband, Steve, and I are high school sweethearts. He is the lead editor and co-founder of our business podcasting for creatives. We are child free by choice, so no kiddos, but we do have four dogs that we adopted out of local shelters. And I have a ton of guilty pleasures. I love books. I have a color-coded bookshelf. I love nonfiction and fiction. I really can't choose a favorite. I am a guilty as charged reality TV fan, love a good cheese plate. I am obsessed with listening to podcasts and traveling in all forms. I really like road tripping, staying in different Airbnbs, exploring new countries like Iceland and hopefully soon Greece and Croatia and all these other places I'm dreaming about. And I'm insanely curious. I love to learn. I'm a super fun-loving Enneagram seven. Maybe you're like me, a girl who cannot, for the life of her, just relax and chill. I cannot. I have high-functioning anxiety. And I identify as highly sensitive. I fear failure all the time, and not accomplishing my dreams is probably what I'm most afraid of. And if I'm being honest, creating something with my voice again and putting myself out there has been on my heart for well over a decade. And it was the fear and the distraction of working and having a full-time job that kept me from moving that dream forward. And five years into my sales career, I had hit what I felt was my pinnacle of success. But it didn't feel like enough. That's the crazy part. I wanted a better job title. I was an account executive, but I wanted to be a senior account executive. I wanted a promotion. I pushed myself so hard so I could try to hit my quotas every quarter. And I had this whiteboard in my office. So I'm a very visual person. I loved to track all the goals on there, every single sale that I hit. And there was something about having that visual tool to keep me accountable. Every single one of those sales brought me a dopamine hit every single time. And anytime I could just add another check mark to my whiteboard, I felt so good inside. Like I was winning, I was getting closer to my goal. It just felt so good. But truthfully, when you work in tech, living with a baseline of stress is pretty normal, especially in a sales role, because you're responsible for the revenue and a huge part of the success of a company, hitting their numbers. And we had bought our first home in 2020. And my home has always been my sanctuary. It's a safe space. I love it so much. I had decorated our home the way I wanted, loved it. But at the end of every single workday, I felt like I had to escape from it all. Just run away from all the pressure. Just closing the door to my office and getting out of that space wasn't enough. And my escape, the ritual that I formed was going out to a local neighborhood happy hour. And I would always get a couple of cocktails, no matter what, because I could never just have one. This really did become a ritual multiple nights a week. It was like the low-hanging fruit, the easy thing that I could pull on that gave me relief and lowered my stress and let the tension in my body relax a little. And I know what you're probably thinking like, Allison, why didn't you do yoga? Why didn't you meditate? There's so many other healthier things you could do instead of doing that. And I did do some of those things. I did yoga, I did walk, I did do sauna sessions. But more often than not, it was just easier to take that route, even though it wasn't the healthiest. And it was also a time for my husband Steve and I to catch up about work, future plans. I cringe so hard at all the money we spent week after week. But in those moments when I was feeling so stressed, it was happy for me. And I was able to loosen up. So when I got laid off, which happened in August 2025, it was a weird feeling. My ego was definitely bruised, but I did feel a bit of relief. People will say this all the time that in tech, especially in tech sales, if you stay with a company for more than three years, that's super rare. And I was approaching six years at this company. And I remember walking into my husband's home office right after I had the whole mysterious, unexpected 15-minute sync on my calendar. And he turned around. He was editing podcasts, of course. He turned around and looked at me and said, You're free now. And I remember the initial sting feeling weird, like I said. It was like simultaneous freedom, relief, and what the hell am I going to do with my life washing over me at once. Even though I had dreamed about taking a sabbatical, taking some extended time off from work, I know some companies will offer sabbaticals after five years in or so. I kind of know why at this point. I mean, I was definitely ready for an extended break. So being laid off, I mean, it's been a very interesting journey. Rather than crying about this and being, whoa is me, and oh my God, I need to apply for hundreds of jobs now on LinkedIn. I am treating this as a full-blown reinvention era. And I am leveling up parts of my life that were not leveled up whatsoever when I was working my nine to five. And everything is being affected in this process. My finances are crazily different. My sense of safety and stability, my free time. All of a sudden, I've gone from feeling trapped at my desk, looking out the window, feeling like the world is passing me by, to having more time than I know what to do with, which is definitely a gift and also kind of scary. So that's really the beautiful catalyst in all of this. In the early 2010s, I had a lifestyle blog. It was under an alter ego, and I created content multiple times a week. I hosted events at local restaurants. I kind of created a Boston blogging community. And I earned partnerships with Banana Republic. I hosted an in-store event with them. I got to work with hotels.com. I got invited to parties, even a party that was hosted by the celebrity pop culture media outlet, Us Weekly. And it filled my cup. I was obsessed with that blog. I would work my job, come home, upload my photos, edit my posts, put it all together. But one day I just stopped writing. And all the dreams I had for my blog and what I hoped it would turn into just came to a standstill. And for years after that, so many different ideas came to me in droves of what I could do next creatively. I would walk around in circles, braindumping voice notes into my iPhone with all of my different ideas. In 2015, it was, why don't you start a monthly membership for entrepreneurs? But I was so overwhelmed and paralyzed with fear that I instead decided, I'll be a behind-the-scenes girl and I will work for other successful creators who were living the dreams that I so desperately wanted and craved for myself. So during one of those chapters, I worked for an entrepreneur who was making over $3 million a year in her business. Truly incredible. I got to be on the inside of her course launches. I helped her run her $49 a month membership for entrepreneurs. And I also got to be a fly on the wall inside of her $20,000 masterminds, where I saw these women absolutely crushing it in their businesses. I looked up to them. They were making so much more money than me. They were allowing themselves to not be afraid and put themselves out there. Many even went on to get book deals, cross the seven-figure threshold, and even speak on stages in the years since. And it was definitely one of my most fascinating career experiences by far. But there was always that constant tug and longing in my heart to create for me rather than build someone else's dreams. By the end of the day, there was no energy for hopping behind a mic and doing a podcast, much less record an Instagram story like hell no. But it is wild the changes that I've experienced in these last five months. Probably the biggest one by far is that I mean, this is not going to come as any sort of surprise. I feel less stressed and more at peace. And it's really interesting how stress shows up in our body. So I have a chronic skin condition called rosacea. And if you're not familiar with rosacea, it causes your cheeks to flush. And sometimes these small little breakouts will kind of appear on your face. I would try the simplest skincare routines, the most complex. I mean, I did it all. And there would maybe be out of, I don't know, a three-month period, there might be like 10 days where my skin was completely clear, and then it would just go back to being awful again. My skin has been the clearest it has been consistently in years. It is wild. And I'm still triggering it with sugar and all the things that can also cause it to flare up, but it has stayed at bay for a while, which has been really interesting. My clothes fit a lot better, probably because I'm not sitting so much and I'm also not going out to eat three to four times a week. I have much more capacity to dream again and to brainstorm, which has felt so magical and so exciting. I feel like my creative self that was in this deep slumber and hibernation for so long is slowly waking up. I have also just found myself curious again. I taught myself how to create graphics in Canva. Here I am using my podcast mic, which I've had this podcast mic since I had that job because I wanted to sound good on my calls. Now I'm not using it for Zoom. What I can say though is that the pressure pivots, but it's instead pressure of thinking about what is it gonna look like when my severance runs out or unemployment runs out. And there's pressure to be okay with having a day that might literally consist of just a yoga class and a coffee date with a fellow creative. That is often what my days look like. And I'm finding that that's something I need to build even more of into my day. So the whole reason I wanted to start Real Time Creator and open this conversation is because I think there's two buckets of people that will find solace and inspiration in this show and what it's gonna be. One, I know that there are so many high-achieving women out there who are just crushing it in their careers, but they are tired. I also know there's a whole crew of fellow creators out there who are nosy like me, and you love hearing the behind the scenes of what's going on in someone else's business. This is actually my favorite type of content to indulge in. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I love when the creator shares a behind the scenes update. Like, give me the real reel. I want to know the struggles, the ups and downs, what you're investing in, what you're waffling about, what's keeping you up at night. So that's what real-time creator is going to be. Every single week, you can expect an unfiltered, not super polished, just what I'm thinking and experiencing in real time as I reinvent my life and start over as a creator. And I'm really excited for it. So you'll kind of get to follow along on the journey with me. And I hope you'll stick around because in the next episode, I'm gonna talk all about how I'm creating a sense of safety for myself. Without the safety net of my old salary, and without the stability and structure that a nine to five brings. So it's gonna be a juicy topic, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.