As for the work stress, long story short…okay, not so short…during summer 2007 there was a coup d’état in my department at work; the end result was positive in some ways and negative in others. I was pushed into a new job that I didn’t enjoy—one that was a poor fit for me (the proverbial round peg in a square hole, you might say). I’m not going to whine about how unhappy I was or fling punches at TPTB; there’s no sense in that. I will say, however, that I became very paranoid that I was going to get fired. This was a constant, grinding paranoia that went on for a full year and blotted out nearly everything else in my life. Even writing in my silly little blog seemed like too much work, especially since the situation at work really damaged my self-esteem.
And then, in late June, it happened. No, I didn’t get fired: I got laid off. “Well,” you might be saying, “There is a recession on.” Yes, but that’s not the reason why I lost my job. Nor was my work performance to blame. Again, I won’t go into specifics, but I will say that I lost my job for an incredibly inane, insulting reason—one that still makes me clench my teeth. And the whole thing was handled rather badly, which added further salt to the wounds.
When it happened, a quote from my collection instantly sprang to mind:
… is there some catharsis unknown
to me, when what you fear will happen
happens and there’s nothing more to fear,
and one reaches that calm meadow where
the sacred few are allowed to rest
beyond the walled, polluted city
that cast them out?
–David Bergman, “In the Waiting Room”
The author is writing about AIDS but in my mind I hijacked the poem to represent how I felt when my all-consuming fear finally became a reality and I got booted from the safe familiarity of my job of nearly seven years. When one of your worst fears becomes a reality, it’s both paralyzing and strangely comforting. It’s over. The smothering cloth of fear and worrying are finally over. You can quit holding your breath.
What’s funny about this whole thing is that I was suddenly delivered a piece of luck that was utterly alien to me and my birds-shitting-on-my-head kind of life. Namely, I was offered a new job—a much better-paying job—less than 24 hours after getting canned. I know, right? It’s insane!
I’d been looking for a new job for six months. I loved the company I worked for, despite some backstage political and bureaucratic nonsense that I could’ve lived without. I loved the cause for which they were fighting. I loved many of the people. It was a great work environment is so many ways. But the salary…ah, the salary. The company was a nonprofit, so I couldn’t begrudge their pay scale, especially during a recession. I believed in the cause (still believe in it, actually) and accepted that working there meant getting a second job. So, to make ends meet, pay my bills, and keep a roof over my head, I had to supplement my income with freelancing work. A mind-jarring amount of freelancing work.
After several years of this, I was just so fucking burned out—I can’t even describe it. I put up with it for a long time by keeping myself on autopilot, running solely on adrenaline, blindly juggling without thinking. Then we had the coup at work and suddenly the vibe in my department was chilly and stressful, not warm and enjoyable, and suddenly I could do nothing right. My self-esteem disappeared; that loss was quickly followed a loss of my freelancing momentum. I slammed into a brick wall. All the balls I was juggling crashed to the floor and I was never able to regroup and get myself back into the groove that kept me plowing ahead for so long. I became flustered and frazzled; I began making mistakes (to a degree where one of my freelancing jobs was even taken away from me) and I couldn’t concentrate. Juggling seven or eight gigs felt very overwhelming to me. I just couldn’t deal with it anymore and knew I had to get out. I created an art project that illustrated how trapped I felt:
I knew it was essential for me to reclaim myself, reclaim my leisure time, my spend-an-entire-weekend-reading time, my meandering time, my photography time, my me time.
Unfortunately, dropping the freelancing meant having to get a new job, because there was no way in hell I could pay my mortgage and bills on my core salary alone. So I blew the dust off my resume, snagged some reference letters, signed up for job search websites, and began looking for something new, focusing mainly on federal government jobs. A friend took a few how-to-get-a-federal-job courses and gave a bunch of us tutorials afterward to help us craft acceptable federal resumes. Applying for federal work is horrific in its own right, and thanks to the freelancing, I just didn’t have the time to apply for more than, like, one job per month. I applied for some private sector jobs as well, but didn’t get anywhere—not even a nibble. Maybe it was because of the recession or maybe I just suck, I don’t know, but it was very emotionally depleting.
Then, about six months later, my ex-boss called me and said that the guy who replaced me seven years earlier (and was later promoted to a manager position) was leaving the company, so she wanted me to apply for the job. My eyes bugged out on their stalks when I learned that this would bring a $19k salary increase. My new salary would be more than my current core salary and freelancing earnings combined! A slam-dunk solution to my problem, right? Well, not really, because I am a glutton for making things unnecessarily difficult. I fretted incessantly about the new commute (which would be awful) and my ability to do the job. I can’t emphasize enough just how much my job had pulverized my self-esteem by that point. I honestly felt like I was incapable of doing anything, especially the challenging job being offered to me. So I hemmed and hawed, agonized, made pro and con lists, and finally yelled at myself for being all woe is me about having to pick between two jobs during a recession when so many people would kill to have any job at all. Did I mention that all this wailing and gnashing of teeth took place over the course of only two days? I love to cram as much drama into as tight a space as possible, apparently.
Exactly two days after my job interview, I got laid off. As shell-shocked as I was, I also left the HR director’s office grinning, almost giddy with the realization that the decision of whether I should take the new job had been made for me. It had been plucked out of my hands. And rather than feel insulted or pissy at having a major life decision ripped away from me, I was absolutely relieved. For a minute I kind of understood the otherwise inexplicable Christian patriarchy phenomenon where women surrender all their decisions to their mates.
Another stroke of good luck: I had a full month off between jobs. My layoff was on June 19th and my new job began on July 20th. When was the last time I had a full month off work? I think it was probably the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college when I never bothered to get a job. So, 16 years. Wow. It felt incredible.
Don’t get me wrong…my unexpected vacation had its share of tensions, such as wrangling with the dense bureaucracy of the unemployment office (after stringing me along for weeks, they finally said they couldn’t give me any money because I was going to receive a severance package. So that’s why I'd been paying into the unemployement system for 20 years—so they could deny me even a dime when I finally needed it? Nice.) and fighting to actually get my severance check (it took my ex-employer a full month to get it to me, and that was with me nagging and prodding). I got really sick a few days after the layoff, too; I’m not sure if it was a bad reaction to some Thai food I’d eaten the day before or if it was flatulence gone wild, but either way, I was in agonizing pain, couldn’t walk upright for days, and was thisclose to going to an emergency clinic. Plus much of my time was spent being endlessly paranoid that either my new company would change their mind about hiring me (especially after learning about the layoff) or that my old company would withdraw their severance offer after learning that I’d been hired somewhere else right away. And, of course, I worried incessantly about the new job and my ability to do it.
Still, I came up with a laundry list of fun things to do during my break, and, of course, I only accomplished like three of them. I’d underestimated just how quickly a month can zip by when one is not working. I got some reading, relaxing, and freelancing done, and I made a few day trips: Harper’s Ferry (two trips, one to explore the town and another to spend an afternoon swimming in the river) and Annapolis. I went on a massive hike with friends in Pennsylvania. I attended a friend’s playhouse performance in Delaware. I actually cooked—something I never do—making six meals from scratch. I worked on a few art projects and puttered around the house. It was very, very nice.
The new job has been good so far but the commute is awful, as suspected. I desperately tried to make a 8-4:30 schedule work because I’m still freelancing and need to get home at a reasonable hour in the evenings to plow through my perpetual proofreading backlog, but it just didn’t happen. Again with the round peg in the square hole. Although I was getting up at the ungodly hour of 5:30am each day I was still sitting in traffic for at least 90 minutes (usually longer). For a 36-mile drive! So this week I surrendered to the inevitable: I hoisted the white flag and switched to a 10-6:30 schedule. My commute is now a billion times better but these working hours are interfering horribly with my freelancing. However, I plan to quit all but once of my freelance jobs this month, so the freelancing thing won’t be an issue much longer.
I really want to make an effort to write in this blog more often from this point forward. Things will surely be spotty at first, while I get through the last of my freelancing, but hopefully it won’t be as bad as the past year when I neglected it altogether.
song heard most recently before posting:
Shelter—Ray LaMontagne
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2 comments:
I am so glad you're back!!
Yep, fb does suck the creative energy out of us: time spent there is time not spent writing..
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