A Googler who lost her job in January's cuts says being laid off 'freed' her to launch a wellness business after suffering from Lyme disease in college

• Emily Cahill, a software engineer, was one of 12,000 people laid off by Google in January.
• She told Insider she's starting a wellness club after struggling with Lyme disease in college. 
• Cahill called being laid off a "blessing" because she "didn't want to be at Google forever." 

A former engineer at Google who was laid off after five years at the tech giant said she's using losing her job as an opportunity to launch an online wellness club to help people like her after she got Lyme disease in college.

Emily Cahill, a software engineer who joined Google in 2017, told Insider she was one of 12,000 people affected by the company's brutal job cuts in January. Her identity and termination by Google have been verified by Insider. 

"Even though I was really devastated when I got the news about the layoffs, it's my responsibility to take that and turn it into something positive," Cahill said in an interview with Insider.

Cahill is starting an online membership community with her best friend called Whole Healing Club for "people who want to grow in mind, body, and soul," after her own struggles with Lyme disease led her to change her lifestyle drastically.

"There are people out there that are going through the same thing that I went through. How can I be the person that I needed when I was in college and I was struggling, and I had no one to tell me that my lifestyle — what I was eating, drinking, consuming — was making that worse?"

Cahill shared her journey with Lyme disease with Insider and how being laid off was a launching pad to start her own business. 

'I could barely keep my eyes open'

When Cahill was diagnosed with Lyme disease, it was "very hard" because she was visiting doctors all the time and falling asleep at work. 

"I had horrible chronic fatigue, like so bad, I remember I was at an internship and even if I got a full night's eight hours of sleep, I would be sitting in meetings and I could barely keep my eyes open. I would have to go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet just to rest my eyes." 

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection caused by a bite from an infected tick and includes symptoms like high temperatures, fatigue, and loss of energy. Cahill described similar symptoms including frequent colds, chest pain, heart palpitations, anxiety, panic attacks, dizziness, and fainting. 

After contracting the disease, Cahill made substantial changes to her lifestyle like cutting out alcohol completely, going onto a plant-based diet, juicing, practicing meditation, and getting acupuncture – habits she kept when she joined Google. 

She said health and healing became a "lifelong journey for her" and her passion for it inspired the idea for the wellness club. 

She decided to get an Integrative Nutrition Coach certification during the COVID-19 pandemic while working at Google. 

"It started sparking ideas like 'Okay where can I go with this from here?' I knew I didn't want to be a Google forever so in a post-Google-life for me what can I do with this?" 

Cahill said when her best friend became a meditation teacher, she approached her about a business idea to help people who were struggling with their physical and mental health. 

"It's very isolating to change your whole lifestyle. You're the only person that's going through that so I wanted to create this community so that other people who are going through the same thing don't feel alone and can connect with others." 

Being laid off 'freed' her 

Cahill said being laid off "freed me up a lot" because work was so time consuming. She can pour her "whole energy" into Whole Healing Club. 

"You can only move forward so much when I was only able to contribute the time and energy that I had after putting in like eight to nine hours a day at Google. So it was very slow going in that sense," she said. 

The layoff also taught her not to put too much value on titles: "I would just not maybe become as attached as I had to the idea of being like a software engineer at Google as that was something that I was very proud of and there were points where that became my identity. That makes it a lot harder when you go through something like this." 

Cahill says she saved up a substantial amount while working at Google including equity which means she has "some money to play around with there when it comes to growing a company." 

She said: "As horrible as it is to go through being laid off, it's almost like a blessing for me. My boyfriend describes it like it's almost as if I had an angel investor give me money and say 'Hey, you can just work on your idea.'"