I was laid off earlier this month.
This wasn’t how I wanted to start Camp NaNoWriMo (or any day). Like many people in my company and around the world, I was furloughed in early April due to the pandemic. Given the highly-affected sector my company provides tech and services for, the subsequent layoff wasn’t a huge surprise.
Coming from the world of small startups and self-employment, I’ve been through the wringer when it comes to losing gigs. One company shut down. Others ran out of money or work to do. Yet others were temporary to start with. My last job was a permanent position that transitioned into a contract position.
Somehow this was my first formal layoff from a permanent position. It took long enough.
Yes, I’m sad about it. I liked the work and the team I was working with. I enjoyed working on various projects that weren’t just writing and that “add breadth to my professional skill set” as the business folks would say. But in a way, I already spent the last three months in a constant state of uncertainty thanks to the furlough, so not much has changed in my day-to-day life. I got the pre-mourning out of the way over the furlough period and may have alarmed my boss and grandboss with my cheerfulness during the call.
Upon further reflection, I’m not mourning the job I had. I’m mourning the life I was working toward in the Before Times.
See, I had plans for this year and the next couple of years. I was going to become debt-free, quit freelancing, go on a vacation alone without any event attached to it, on and on. I was going to reclaim the life that had been slowly burning out over the past couple of years. I was going to get my midlife crisis out of the way early (although frequent lurkers may rightfully argue I’ve had several midlife crises already) and learn to relax a little.
Slowly but surely, I was making progress. Just before the pandemic got serious, I had reached six months in emergency savings and finished repaying my student loans. I had accumulated a week and a half of vacation time from work, ready to get away once I finished a couple of big projects. May was a 3-paycheck month and I had plans to finish off the rest of my debt with that third paycheck. Things were looking up.
The pandemic flushed all those plans down the drain. No Hamilton, no Dragon Con, no Safari Zone, no Chicago trip for Go Fest, no NaNoGiving, no random vacation. Even worse, the pandemic is pressing the pause button on any plan I might want to make right now due to its lack of control in this country and state.
It hurts, knowing that I’ve worked so hard to reach a stable point in my life where I could think about a future beyond just paying the bills and paying off debt, only to turn my basic survival instinct back on again.
I’m no stranger to this adversity. Hell, I finished college during the worst of the Great Recession and went through multiple years of unemployment and underemployment. Sadly I won’t be surprised if it takes a year to find a new job. I’m used to it. The voice in the back of my head tells me I should expect a two-year-long job search, so good thing I’m still able to save.
Turning this voice off is the hard part. While I’m in a comfortable position for the moment, so many others don’t have a safety net of family, savings, or a partner’s income. Many pandemic aid measures (additional unemployment payments, mortgage and student loan relief, for example) will last through the end of July, and I fear for what will happen to many people next month if they’re not renewed.
I keep trying to find hope now, but the constant inability to concentrate on anything that takes more than two minutes of effort makes it difficult, especially after two months of big productive energy. That doesn’t stop me from trying, little by little, using my influx of spare time to build something new in the meantime.
The Team Go Rocket grunts using dark-type Pokemon say “Wherever there is light, there is also shadow”. But wherever there is shadow, there is also light.