Losing a job you worked hard for can knock the wind out of you, and that’s what happened to content creator and social media marketer Lea Chen. Her layoff arrived at the most unexpected moment, hitting right as she was settling into a role she once considered the peak of corporate success.
Here, we’ll walk through Lea Chen’s experience: the shock of being cut during Amazon’s large round of corporate layoffs, the emotional weight that followed, and how she rebuilt her confidence by returning to her creative roots. We’ll also look at how her daily routines, community support, and personal identity shifted once the job was gone.
How Amazon’s layoff changed Lea’s path
The morning everything shifted felt like any other. Lea woke up, checked her phone, and saw two messages. One said a colleague had been laid off. The other, from HR, asked her to check her personal email. When she opened it, she learned she was among the 14,000 corporate employees Amazon let go. She had just celebrated one year as a senior social media manager at Amazon Ads, and her birthday was only a week away.
Shock came first. Lea couldn’t grasp it, even though rumors of cuts had been floating around the day before. She had been prepping for a mid-November event and juggling the usual tasks at one of the biggest tech companies in the US. In seconds, all of that disappeared. She called her partner and her parents to share the news, still trying to understand what it meant.
For Lea, working at Amazon had symbolized a major milestone. At Wharton, many classmates chased FAANG jobs, and landing one of those roles felt like proof that you were doing well. As a Chinese-American daughter of immigrant parents, the Amazon name carried even more weight. Her family knew the brand. Even her grandma recognized it from the packages on their doorstep. The job felt like something they could all be proud of.
She also genuinely enjoyed the work—interviewing celebrities, attending red carpet events, traveling for global projects, and representing Amazon Ads at places like Cannes Lions. Losing that overnight left a space she didn’t know how to fill.
Rediscovering purpose outside of the corporate world
What helped Lea steady herself was something she had already been building: her part-time content creation. Before the layoff, she had been sharing NYC restaurant guides, Asian eats, and local recommendations. So she decided to lean into it, posting daily under a new series she called “Lea After Layoff”. It became her way to process the shock, share her thoughts, and own her story instead of letting the layoff define her.
Lea filled her days with moments that reminded her who she was outside of Amazon. She ate pho alone in Chinatown, grabbed weekday lunches with her dad and sister in Koreatown, explored new corners of New York City, and ran across boroughs with her super mutt, Arlo. These small rituals grounded her. They reminded her that identity doesn’t come from a LinkedIn headline.
Her videos quickly gained traction, hitting more than a million views. Former Amazon coworkers reached out. Strangers left supportive comments. A sense of community formed around her honesty, and that connection helped her move forward. She knows now that she’s more than her job, more resilient than she expected, and better off for giving herself space to reconnect with what matters.