What Happened
My 1:1 got moved. It got moved a lot. But when I went to connect, instead of her face, I saw just a flash of our HR business partner.
There is only one reason someone from HR crashes your 1:1 without warning.
The minute I saw her face, I knew what was happening, and my stomach turned over, a lake in summer.
And thus commenced the last meeting at this employer, a place which I’d left and to which I’d returned three times over a broken twelve-year period that spanned the whole of my marriage and all of my daughter’s life. The last time I came back was a year and half after my first-ever career lay-off - the one that broke my heart and my ego.
Lay-offs. I didn’t see either one coming, but this time I greeted the news with equal parts rage and disgust, with a serum dropper of relief dribbled across the top.
When I came back last, I’d gone through a huge, terrifying six months of unemployment, during which I could not settle or find purchase in my personal life. Money was tight before the lay-off, and there was very little in savings. We cut all the way back. Like all the way back. In a way I don’t want to repeat.
This time, it was five months.
This time, I had seven additional years of life experience and some more cash in the bank with which to line my foxhole.
It was still awful.
The thing I noticed the most was my inability to let myself feel anything other than surface emotions. With so much uncertainty, my anxiety lived on idle most of the time, revving with certain headlines but never shifting from neutral to park. I stopped writing. I stopped thinking farther into the future than when I would find my next job.
The hardest thing about being unemployed: Nobody can pull you out but you. The worse you feel about yourself, the longer the process will take, because people can smell professional fear over Zoom. I wanted so bad to dig like a badger into the pockets of why, but doing so would not bring a new job. Reflection was for another day, a paid day.
Three days after I got laid off this time, I found myself standing in line in customs in the Dominican Republic. We prepaid. A coworker reached out on LinkedIn. At the time, the whole thing was too fresh. I cried in the customs line. Yep. I did. I was an achiever with nothing to achieve. Losing a self-identity can’t be underplayed. There’s not that much holding us in this world.
Here’s what I thought about over those five months of unemployment this summer. Most people I respect have fallen from glory at some point in their career. If you’re the kind of person who throws in with authenticity, at some point, you’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. When the chips are down, you go from this moment to that moment as well as you can. The current world of work is a game of thrones where loyalty went out with pensions and you must test the ice with every step. That’s scary and hard and I won’t pretend it’s not.
But. But! ONWARD.
Update: It ended. The bad times always do. I started a new job - actually a better job - in October 2023. I started working on a writing project again. I let myself probe the emotions I hid from myself over the summer. My husband and daughter had the best summer of their lives — which is awesome — but I did not. I could not, because I breathe achievement and this summer, I was a live wire dancing across pavement too close to your front door.
That, too, is done. Giddyup.