Happy anniversary (of being laid off!)

365 days.

(The news, when it broke)

A year ago today, CNN laid me off.

I’d like to tell you I saw it coming. I didn’t. Yes, I knew CNN needed to make cuts for budgetary reasons. But, no, I never thought I would be one of them.

Knowing that this anniversary was coming up, I have found myself wandering back through the clips from those days (the news actually took two days to break) and the responses people had to the news.

Yes, thanks for noticing, this is a bit self-flagellating. The people who react to your firing publicly aren’t, usually, your biggest fans.

---

Subscribe to my newsletter today and get 20% off membership for life. Just $4 a month! Or $40 a year!

---

But, in sorting through it all — and through my feelings, a year removed from it — I do have something I wanted to share. Something I have been thinking about a lot lately.

So, here we go.

The immediate reaction to being let go is that this is definitional. That you will forever be known as “Fired political journalist Chris Cillizza.” That this is your last chapter. The end.

That is the message that detractors (in Donald Trump’s parlance “haters and losers”) want to be the lasting one. You have been judged and found wanting. You have failed. And, worst/best of all, you deserved it.

The immediate responses to my removal — largely on Twitter — were of this vengeful sort. I finally got what was coming to me because of how I covered Hillary Clinton’s email issues during the 2016 campaign. Or because of my advanced case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Or because I just sucked in general.

For those people, they wanted my being laid off from CNN as the final word on me — and from me. It was easier that way. They had a one-dimensional view of me (I was bad) and this decision from CNN affirmed that view. They were right. And righteous.

To be honest, I wallowed in those comments for, well, a while. Even though I knew it served no good purpose — and was actively bad for my mental and physical health — I scrolled endlessly through people I had never met dunking on me.

It was like staring at the sun. Or slowing down to look closely at a car accident. I couldn’t help myself.

After a week or so, the world moved on — as it does. I’d still take the occasional shot via social media. But, other people — more prominent than me — were experiencing misfortune. The horde had moved on.

Which, by the way, was its own little death too. Weirdly, the week or so after I got laid off, I was oddly energized. People were talking about me! Sure, some (many?) of them were spitting vitriol. But they were still talking! I was relevant! I mattered (still)!

Then, quickly, that sick thrill too was gone. And I was left alone with my new reality. And this big question: What the hell do I do now?

My initial instinct was — and I hate to admit this — to give up. To walk away. Find some other profession. Or some other life. Anything to escape the sense that I had somehow — and I couldn’t really grasp how — failed in this one.

I didn’t do much in those early days. I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. I tried to exercise but found I lacked the energy for it. I kept finding myself online — desperate to see if anyone was (still) writing or talking about me. They weren’t.

I got low. Really low.

There wasn’t a single day I can pinpoint where that started to change, where I woke up and said “things are going to be different!”

What happened, gradually, was that I realized this: If I gave up on what I loved — and let the last word on me be my removal from CNN — I was letting the worst actors win. I was letting them write my life story rather than taking control of it myself.

So, I started this Substack. Mostly to try to reclaim some space for myself — and to keep doing the thing (writing, analyzing) that had given me so much pleasure over the last several decades.

Was it hard? You bet. Going from the massive audience offered by CNN to a hundred (or less!) readers and subscribers SUCKED. But, even in those days, I realized how much joy I took from the simple process of writing — and the connections (however small) my words formed with other people.

Those connections helped in another way I had never anticipated. It made me realize that I was far from the first person to be dumped from a job. In fact, it had happened — in some way, shape or form — to almost everyone.

That realization prompted me to start to reach out to people — journalists, PR folks, old sources — to talk about the future. I went from being embarrassed and isolated to at least a little emboldened. In those meetings, I grew more and more comfortable saying “CNN laid me off.” I got used to asking for help and guidance. I started to feel a little less sorry for myself. (I wrote about those meetings — and what they have meant to me — here.)

Slowly but definitely surely, things got better. Not perfect. But better.

These days, when I get up in the morning, I don’t feel dread. Or self loathing. Or disappointment. I feel (guarded) optimism. I feel possibility. (Can one feel possibility? Well, you know what I mean.)

I let my firing define me for a good while after it happened. Because, I have now realized, I had staked WAY too much of my identity in being someone people knew. I was on TV! I was a star! Success!

When that was ripped away from me, I was forced to reckon with that fact. And to ask myself who I was without CNN.

The answer? A dad. A husband. A pro wrestling fan. A reader. A lover of music. A guy who likes to stare into his Solo Stove fire on chilly fall nights. (The best!) A friend. A soccer fan(atic). A writer.

In other words, a fully formed, 360 degree, three-dimensional person. Someone who had been affected by a tough thing that happened. But not someone defined forever by that thing. Someone with more story to tell. More chapters to write. More experiences — good and bad — to, er, experience.

What the last year has taught me is that being laid off by CNN is a part of my story. It’s not my whole story. I can never change that it happened. (And re-litigating why it happened is, um, fruitless. Trust me.) All I can do is keep moving forward.

So that’s what I am doing. Step by step. Day by day. 365 of them so far.