It sounds like you are not yet resigned to being fired and still trying to gain back trust.

I've been fired unambiguously once. I was working at a place that was had a promising vision but was badly disordered. I was one of few people other than the founders who claimed to understand that vision which was kinda dangerous because between that and being older and experienced looking I could easily upstage the CEO in the frequent "all hands" meetings that we had. We had one of those meetings go really bad and I had to bail out early to pick up my son who was in trouble at school, I heard the next Monday they were letting me go. It was a relief really.

At another place I was officially laid off when my contract expired but actually it was connected to a set of interlocking scandals that resulted in me, most of my team, my boss, my bosses's boss, the director of our unit, and the president of the whole organization (that employed maybe 15,000 people) leaving.

It started with a major IT project that failed with costs to the organization around $100M which put a cost-cutting target on IT workers, for various reasons I was singled out in my unit, I wound up being an internal whistle-blower for something that could have destroyed one of the most significant web sites for science, I also got pressured to release some software before it was ready, which turned my life upside down for a month before they decided to revert the change.

I almost got another job in a unit of that organization but boy was I sensitive to the slightest bad smell about the people, so I had no job lined up. That weekend I was at a Bed Bath and Beyond and thinking "the product line here really sucks" and in the bathroom I was with my then-small son there was an aerosol spray disinfectant can which had a label that looked really morbid (like "they use this stuff at the Morgue") and I saw the smoke detector and the gears started turning in my head that the aerosol would behave the same as smoke particles and I discharged the can.

Nothing happened right away and I felt crushed, like a total failure. Walking out the door those I head this loud and far-away sound and it took me a couple of seconds to realize I had actually succeeded and then I thought "Oh shit! That means the fire department is going to come" (I hadn't thought that far ahead)

Most people in the store were still confused (fire alarms aren't standardized, it takes people a while to realize what's going on) except for the store manager who was looking right in my direction because the alarm panel was right next to the bathroom. I grabbed my son by the hand and moved straight for the exit and then told my wife to "get the hell out of hear and go to the car".

I'd bought a tailored suit when I knew I had a job search ahead and had an interview that Monday with a previously successful web design company that was now failing because of a tremendous amount of technical debt. It was funny because the boss, one of the best salespeople I've ever met, had refused to hire me years ago when I looked like a hippie and didn't recognize the old me and the new me. I "met him" again years later at a fundraising event and I recognized him but he didn't recognize me.

I did a superhuman amount of work for about 8 months at a superfund site building where nauseating fumes sometimes came out of the vent near where I worked. One day they confronted me with the terrible financial shape the company was in, they wanted to engage me in finding a way out but I "cracked" and quit right then and there.

Two days later I was working at the competing web design firm that was winning contracts that we were losing; I liked a lot of things about it but there was no health insurance so I moved on in a few months to a job working on decision support software for sales teams that I kept for a few years. My boss ended up starting there a few months after I left.

I really did suffer from

https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/cooccurring/moral...

that time and it took me quite a while to recover from it.