What do you do when you lose everything you’ve worked for your entire life? One day, you’re a highly qualified executive; the next, unemployed and seemingly unemployable because of your age. Job loss can mean drastic lifestyle changes, getting by on a reduced budget, or living on the edge of poverty.

“Don’t Hang Up,” a book to be published in 2012, recounts my struggle to reinvent myself after losing a high paying job, home, health insurance and upper class lifestyle. I had to learn to survive in a world I was ill prepared to enter, a world I once thought beneath me. My journey took me to the bottom of the economic barrel in Tijuana, Mexico—and back up again in San Diego when my low-paid job led to a new start.

Importantly, I learned that giving up was not an option.