Most of this isn’t going to help you right now, but this may be an important moment for something in the near future.

Earlier in my career (also IT) I had a couple very similar employment scares. My employer at the time was famous for firing people at the drop of a hat. Worse, while some firings were justified, many were bullshit reasons that no one should be fired for. I remember specifically driving to work one day in during a declared snow emergency (state wide system telling you you should not drive unless someone needs to go to a hospital or other high emergency) which my employer would not honor. It was dangerous driving, and my employer was an extreme stickler for punctuality. If you were 2 minutes late after 7am, you’d get a sit down from your manager by lunch. Here I was scared that I was going to lose my job for being less than 5 minutes late while driving in unsafe conditions to work I shouldn’t even be driving to because if I didn’t I might lose my job for a stupid reason or no reason at all.

It hit me like a lightning bolt in that moment: I could be fired for bad actions on my part or even good actions on my part. I had zero control or influence over being fired. Instead of having any influence over keeping my job, it was a pure arbitrary whim of my employer. Nothing I could do would change the events that were going to occur in the next hour when I pulled into the office and went inside to my desk. If they were going to fire me, they’d already decided and I’d be gone. If they weren’t, it was just going to be a normal day. I was panicking like there was something I could do, when indeed there was nothing to be done.

I slowed the car down to safer driving speeds in that bad weather. I drove in, parked, and walked to my desk like any other day. It turns out that lots of people were out or late that day because of the weather. Some of my coworkers even lived significantly closer than I did, but chose the safe path of not coming in. I put myself at risk for a shitty employer because I was terrified what would happen in the immediate days following without an income. I needed to fix that.

The fix is money. If at some point I would be fired and if I had a savings, I would have the breathing room to know I could take care of next months bills and buy time to find a job. At that time outside of retirement savings and paying bills, each pay period would have me be spending nearly every left over cent I had. The next pay period I would do the same. I needed to change that.

I went to war on my expenses. For a three month I lived like a monk. I canceled every subscription except internet and mobile phone. I only ate out once the entire month and that was because it was the birthday celebration for a family member. I bought the cheapest staple groceries (oats, dried beans, bulk rice, potatoes, canned vegetables, and the cheapest cuts of pork and chicken) and cooked everything myself. I didn’t drive anywhere I didn’t absolutely have to. I read books and got movies from the public library. I watched OTA TV instead of streaming or cable/satellite. I bought virtually nothing. I sold personal belongings I didn’t truly need. I did all of this to build a savings. It sucked to live like this for those months, but I had burned into my memory that most recent day of terror I felt driving into work on that snow day in a long line of prior days just like that. I never wanted to feel that. I saved about 1 months worth of slimmed down expenses that would keep the roof over my head and my belly full.

This meager savings was armor against anxiety! When the next event happened where I thought my employer may fire me, I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t anxious. I was calm knowing that I could handle it and would have an entire month where I could focus on finding something else if I needed to. In the months ahead I would get some raises or bonus and would put that into the savings too. Over the next 2 years I had built up a 6 savings month buffer.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the turning point for my career. I discovered by accident a path to success. That buffer savings meant I wasn’t worried about my job anymore. I wasn’t worried about today, which let me start looking at tomorrow. I had the ability to take professional risks. Not all the risks I took paid off, but way more than I expected did and it launched my career to places (and pay) I never would have ever dreamed of. I can talk more about these risks I took if you’re interested.

So most of this doesn’t help you with where you are in this exact moment except this part:

Nothing I could do would change the events that were going to occur in the next hour when I pulled into the office and went inside to my desk.

There is nothing you can do to change what is ahead for you tomorrow. No amount of worry will influence the events. The die is already cast. If you’re going to be fired, you’re already fired you just don’t know it yet. If you’re not, its just going to be another day at the office. Be at peace in this moment, but also commit this anxiety to memory. Perhaps write it down like its a journal entry. Try to capture all of what you’re feeling right now in words and put them on a page. This is going to be an artifact you can use later if you ever need to remember what now feels like. This also flattens the anxiety from an enormous amorphous idea of feelings down to something contained on a piece of paper with borders and boundaries. Limits by edges that cannot be crossed. Do all of that, and then decide if you ever want to feel this way again and what you would need to personally sacrifice (in the short term) to not have to (in the long term). Would it be worth it to you to live like a monk for a few months to have the armor of comfort surrounding yourself?