Man, June 2021. What a nightmare. I remember just grinding away at the same old gig. You know, the one where you just kinda show up and push buttons, collecting a check. Safe, boring, felt like wearing the same socks for a year. I’m a Virgo, right? We like order, stability. I thought I had it. Everything was neatly planned out, year by year. I was focused, steady, and frankly, kind of asleep at the wheel.
Then bam. Third week of June. Tuesday, maybe a Wednesday, I can’t even remember the damn day anymore. The Big Boss calls an all-hands meeting. Five minutes. Just five damn minutes. Shutting down Project Phoenix. The one I’d been running for eighteen months, the one I poured my soul into, building all those spreadsheets and procedures. Gone. Just like that. Laid off twenty of us. No warning. They even tried to nickel and dime my severance package, like I hadn’t given them the best years of my life.
I was home, staring at the wall. Freaked out. I got bills. The mortgage ain’t paying itself. My partner had just left a good job to start a business, so I was the main income. The pressure was crushing, like someone sat a brick on my chest. I spent two days just doom-scrolling, eating cold leftovers, feeling sorry for myself. That’s when I saw all this crap pop up everywhere: “Major Unexpected Changes for Virgo Career June 2021.” It was trending like crazy. I mean, seriously? Astrological mumbo-jumbo? But damn, it had just happened to me! It felt like the universe was actively trolling me. I didn’t believe in that stuff, but it stuck in my head because the timing was too perfect.
The Messy Process: Ditching the Old Manual
I decided to treat the unexpected change like an instruction manual, even if the source was stupid. My whole career had been organized, predictable, safe. Now, I was forced into the unpredictable. The general ‘career advice’ for Virgos at that time—the stuff popping up in my feed—was always about “embracing the unorganized” or “going solo.” Stupid advice, right? But what the hell, I was out of options. My orderly life was already shredded, so I figured I might as well try the opposite of everything I knew.
This is the log of what I actually did:
- I threw my resume in the trash. Not literally, but I deleted the old master file. The one listing all the boring management crap. It got me fired, so it was useless. I decided I wouldn’t apply for another corporate job that felt like my last one.
- I tried something totally new: the side hustle route. I bought a cheap tablet and tried selling custom design work online. I had zero design skills. I spent four weeks trying to learn Photoshop using free trials and confusing video tutorials. My designs looked like a five-year-old drew them. I got one order from my sister. Total bust. Wasted three weeks.
- I realized I needed to use my brain, not my clumsy hands. I remembered what I actually liked about Project Phoenix: figuring out the really complicated, gnarly dependencies in the system architecture. The stuff nobody else wanted to touch.
- I got angry and just started calling people. Not applying for jobs. Just calling old contacts from my past jobs, people I hadn’t spoken to in five years, and asking, “What are you actually working on that’s cool? What’s the biggest dumpster fire at your place right now?” This was the first good move I made. I totally ignored HR and the job boards.
That last action, the phone calls, led to the real deal. My old college roommate, Mike, he was running tech for a small logistics company. Total startup vibe. Their data pipeline was a catastrophe. They needed someone to just organize their whole infrastructure, which was completely broken, full of manual imports and random scripts nobody understood. No real job title, just “fix it.”
The Real Explanation and Implementation
Old me, the safe, stable corporate Virgo, would have run screaming. Too messy, no procedures, too much risk. New me, the unemployed guy who just felt the ground drop out from under him in June 2021, said, “Sure, I’ll take it.” I needed the cash, and honestly, the sheer chaos of it was kinda thrilling after the corporate snooze-fest. I was starting from absolute zero with their system.
I busted my ass for six months. I didn’t know the specific scripting language they used, so I had to learn Python and understand cloud architecture fast. I was working 12 hours a day, sleeping five, feeling that panic you get before a massive exam. I didn’t try to make it organized at first; I just acted. I moved the furniture around their office and then figured out the plumbing later. I patched every major leak in their system, one ugly, messy script at a time. The stability came only after I embraced the initial instability.
What I figured out is this: The “Major Unexpected Changes” part? It wasn’t the stars telling me I was going to lose my job. The old job was stagnant and doomed anyway. The change was simply the universe forcing my hand. It was a massive shove off the cliff of comfort. The “What You Should Do Next” was simply to stop trying to be safe and start building something myself, from the ground up, even if it felt disorganized and totally against my nature.
Now? Fast forward a couple years. That logistics company? We got acquired by a bigger player. Not a massive payout, but I got a decent chunk of equity, and now I run the whole data side of the merged entity, building the architecture from scratch my way. I have true control. The pay is double what I made at the old gig, and I actually like coming to work. I finally understand the whole “career alignment” thing they talk about. It took getting fired in a shocking, sudden way in June 2021 to finally start living it.
So if you’re a Virgo and you see some stupid article like this pop up, don’t read it like a prediction. Read it like an order. Something is coming to an end. Don’t fight the change. Dive headfirst into the new mess, because that’s where the real opportunity actually is. It all starts when your comfortable chair gets yanked out from under you.
