On July 23, 2018, I walked into a conference room in the New York Daily News newsroom in downtown Manhattan and was told I no longer had a job at the newspaper I grew up reading.



I was 24 years old, and I’d been laid off for a second time, both by the Daily News.



So many thoughts ran through my mind, all of them dripping with self-doubt.



Was I really cut out for this? Was I good enough? If I was good enough, why did I keep losing my damn job? Was it time to give up on my boyhood dream? Is it too late to go to law school? Am I really going to be a lawyer? Why didn’t I just major in accounting?



Those thoughts persisted as I left the building and headed straight for Stone Street with a few of my other now-jobless coworkers. We sat down at the bar and — like so many others before and after us — did the only thing you can do after getting laid off: We drank and sulked and reminisced and tried our very best to talk about all the...