Losing a job can be one of the biggest setbacks in a person's career. For many, it means immediately searching for another source of income. Others, however, use the moment to rethink what they really want to do. That is exactly what happened with one former Google employee, who says a layoff ended up changing the course of her life and led her to a career she had always wanted to pursue.

Trinette Faint, a former executive business partner at Google, shared her journey in a first-person essay published by Business Insider. She said she worked at Google from August 2018 until November 2024, earning more than $200,000 through her salary and exercised equity when she left the company. While the layoff left her financially uncertain, she said it also gave her the push to fully commit to acting, filmmaking and writing.

According to Business Insider, Faint said the layoff came as a shock. "My manager told me the layoff was performance-related, but I never felt that was true," she wrote. She described herself as "traumatized, angry, and shocked." The timing made things even harder as her senior dog, Avery, had died just two weeks earlier, and she was preparing for knee surgery. She even had her surgery moved forward so it would be covered by Google's health insurance before her benefits ended.

After recovering from surgery, Faint said she chose not to rush back into another corporate role. Instead, she took what she called a "creative gap year," spending her time writing, acting, filmmaking and launching her networking company, Chez Faint, while also working as a contract field marketing manager for Udacity, part of Accenture. "I was definitely financially destabilized by the layoff, but I'm much more fulfilled than ever before. The trade-off has absolutely been worth it," she wrote in Business Insider.

A script that unexpectedly mirrored real life

Speaking in an interview on Sarah Walton's YouTube channel, Faint said the layoff felt like more than just bad timing because it closely resembled a story she had already written.

Months before losing her job, she had written a TV pilot called Peri Does Europe, in which the lead character is fired from a tech company just before travelling across Europe, where she begins chasing her creative ambitions. Faint herself was laid off the day before leaving for London. She said she saw the coincidence as a sign that it was finally time to embrace the creative side of herself that had been pushed aside during years in corporate jobs.

'10 lives' that prepared her for this moment

During the interview, Faint described her career as a series of "10 lives." Long before joining Google, she worked as a model in France, assisted actor Matt Damon, worked at Will Smith's production company, coordinated celebrity guests at the Tribeca Film Festival, worked in journalism and photography, and later built a career in technology.

Rather than viewing those jobs as unrelated, she said every experience helped shape her storytelling. She believes each chapter of her career gave her material that she now draws from as a screenwriter and filmmaker.

Building a new career around creativity

Faint also spoke about her latest venture, Chez Faint, which focuses on creating smaller and more meaningful networking events for creatives, entrepreneurs and professionals. She said she wanted to move away from what she sees as impersonal corporate networking and instead build genuine human connections.

She also continues to develop screenplays centred on confident, globally minded Black women, while working with producers in Paris and Los Angeles on future projects.

Although she admitted the transition has meant giving up financial security and a steady paycheck, she said she has no desire to return to her old life simply for stability.

Reflecting on everything that has happened over the past year and a half, Faint wrote in Business Insider: "From losing my dog and job, to recovering from knee surgery, to becoming an award-winning actor and filmmaker, blows my mind. A year and a half in, my future is brighter than ever before. I have zero regrets and no plans to change anything if I need a more stable income in the future."