I wrote a post at the beginning of the year about ontological shock – that moment when your understanding of the world breaks apart under the weight of new truths. At the time, I didn’t know I was about to be placed at risk of redundancy. But in hindsight, I think I already sensed the tremors. That post was an intellectual exercise on the surface, but emotionally… it was foreshadowing.
This post is something of a sequel.
It’s more personal than usual, and maybe more emotionally exposed. It’s not really about a tool, a heuristic, or a carefully facilitated intervention. It’s about what happens after the shock – when the system you thought you were part of spits you out, and you have to decide whether to stay broken, or re-form.
It’s also partial, inevitably. I’ve written before about being an unreliable narrator – systems thinking reminds us that no account is ever complete, no perspective ever neutral. This is just one thread, pulled from a much bigger weave. But it’s a thread I’ve been holding tightly for months now, and it feels like time to lay it down.
This year, two major experiences reshaped me. One was being placed at risk of redundancy after months of feeling sidelined and excluded at work. The other was cycling from Land’s End to John o’ Groats: an eleven-day, thousand-mile endurance ride through hills, headwinds, and painkillers (read more about my LEJOG experience here).
One of those was chosen. One was not. But both, in their own ways, forced a confrontation with uncertainty, identity, and resilience.
In the redundancy story, the beginning was slow and murky: gradually realising I was being shut out of conversations, overlooked, made peripheral. It took some weeks of this ‘hint of something off’ before the gut-wrenching reveal, where I was finally brought into the loop and my role was declared redundant. Fortunately I didn’t see the process through, and found a new role in time – one that felt like a rescue at first, but has become something much better than that: a challenging, interesting, valued space where I can do work that matters.
In the LEJOG story, the pain was more immediate. On day three, my shoulder gave out. My bike set up was off, and the accumulated pain became so intense I genuinely believed I would have to abandon the trip. I even started mentally reframing my role: I wouldn’t quit, exactly, just dip in and out when I could. A LEJOG-inspired tribute act.
But in both cases, something happened.
Not a miracle. Not a solution. But a shift.
At work, a new opportunity emerged, and I jumped. On the bike, my paramedic daughter – part of our support crew – dosed me with a robust cocktail of painkillers and got me through the day. I made some adjustments. I kept riding. And that day got me through the trip. The pain didn’t vanish, but it became manageable. The story moved forward.
And that’s the thing I keep coming back to: I didn’t solve the uncertainty. I outlasted it.
This is a kind of resilience that rarely gets celebrated. It doesn’t look noble or cinematic. It looks like late-night Weetabix (read the other post!). It looks like awkward honesty in one-to-ones. It looks like micro-adjustments to your handlebars and having another 11-hour ‘try’. It looks like lying on the floor of a meeting room wondering how to compartmentalise it all enough to show up again tomorrow. It’s not about winning. It’s about not stopping.
There is anger in all of this, too. Let’s not pretend there isn’t. The experience of being excluded, undervalued, quietly erased from a system you helped build is enraging. The way organisations dehumanise under pressure. The silence. The looking away. That stuff does damage. It erodes something in you.
But what I’ve learned is that there is power in not letting that be the end of the story. I didn’t bounce back – I re-formed. Slightly more cynical, maybe. Slightly more tuned in to the edges and fractures. But also more grounded. Clearer about what matters. More aware of the invisible systems that shape our sense of worth.
My systems thinking hasn’t given me special protection from any of this. But it has helped me make sense of the patterns: to see when feedback loops are turning toxic, when boundaries are shifting, when my role in a system is being recoded. It helps me ask better questions. It helps me understand that a system doesn’t settle – and maybe, neither do I.
So here I am. Still riding. Still tired. Slightly scarred. Slightly stronger. And still not done.
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