What to do after getting laid off, from someone who was laid off 4 times in 5 years
2015 was 5 years ago right
An incomplete list.
Be in shock.
When that wears off, cry a lot.
Wonder how you’re going to get a new job, apply for unemployment, get your own health insurance, and work on your novel in the three days before the month ends.
Tell your friends, and family, at your own pace.
Your friends say you can just do the above in parts.
Be grateful for the ones that ask you to get drinks.
Be really angry at your friends who tell you reassuring LIES like everything will be okay.
Tell your friend who also got laid off about this anger. “They’re just scared because they know they’re next,” she says.
Wonder if all human empathy can be explained in terms of the theory of relativity.
Tell another friend that with each layoff you feel more and more like yourself, and you want to be more yourself than ever, and you can’t seem to stop the runaway train of wanting to be yourself. That with each layer, a false sense of yourself molts.
Be shocked into silence when your friends say that’s a good thing.
Get really sick, because you have asthma and it’s Halloween and the devil doesn’t like you to celebrate his day.
Stop taking your ADHD meds because while they are not stimulants, decongestants are, and your heart isn’t gonna win that race.
Stop taking the meds entirely so you can sleep more and do less.
Despite the pain, the sickness, the suffering, be the happiest you’ve been in a while. Feel a gold light inside you. Feel like the unburied treasure from the Goonies. Feel free.
Take lots of long hot showers because your landlady pays for water.
Play with your art supplies and see what happens when you use them.
Watch Cat’s Eye and don’t finish it.
Watch The Cat From Outer Space and don’t finish it.
Watch The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and don’t finish it.
Watch The Worst Person in the World and finish it. Regret it.
Okay so like you don’t want to get into it but if that girl had any friends they would’ve told her Acksel was a controlling creep and she was just with him because she needed a father figure. Also, like a physicist or a TV writer, a “slightly sexist cartoonist” is guaranteed to suck.
Also that last third was so cloyingly obvious you thought it was a joke at first. Definitely written by a man.
Get annoyed, in absentia, at friends in relationships that you feel are doomed to fail. Partly because they have disappeared into the relationship in a way where talking to them makes you feel awkward. Make mental guesses on how long they will take to break up, and only just stop yourself from taking bets with mutual friends.
That doesn’t stop you from making bets with people who AREN’T their mutual friends.
(Don’t worry, none of them read this newsletter.)
Wonder if maybe you’re a bad person for thinking all this, and actually that’s why you DESERVED to be let go, you terrible person. But realize that actually it was more that these friends will frequently talk about their partner in a way that makes your stomach lurch, and you know them well enough and actually seen them through enough breakups to…well, to know where this is going.
You vacillate between wanting them to hurry up and deal with what they’re hiding from themselves, or just blurting it out yourself, so you can get the process going.
You decide to put all these feelings into the novel you abandoned earlier this year.
Realize, as you write that you often had the same problems at companies before — where you had to decide between whether something was worth being annoyed with and whether something wasn’t — usually, it was, but then there was the added problem of: do you say anything? How much is pointing out something worth it?
Usually not as much as people say it does, you now understand.
The book writing is going really well. It feels…kind of like how you did when you were freelance writing.
Realize you don’t have the same complaints when you were freelance, when you were your own boss.
You watch a video on being an illustrator for children’s book and they’re all the actual complaints you had as a freelancer.
Draw some characters in the children’s book you made up — two years ago — that you still think about.
Mostly because one of your friends, upon hearing what it was about, implied that the sad blue fairy godmother was secretly you.
I would like to go back to being freelance. It helps that you, as a person, are a much kinder, more compassionate manager to yourself than any of the managers laying you off were.
Now, at least.
For the first time in a million years.
When did you first start hating yourself?
During another one of these layoffs, you think. But it could’ve been before. Or before that. Or before that, even.
It was a slow and gradual hating of yourself, of your most elemental personality traits, that got you into this mess, you think one day. You don’t think deeper because you know it’s true but you need to dissect every word of that sentence to understand it.
Realize that’s actually a big problem with your writing style, your voice. You’re inclined to summing up your conclusions rather than really going for it.
Reread this, which you wrote five years ago. No, eight. (Eight?!) Be shocked to find it useful to you now.
Remember when you delighted in freelance writing, when you tried every idea you could, when you sent email after email, constantly challenging yourself and riding on the spirit of your own gratification.
Feel better slowly, and also more like yourself, without the meds. Like who you WERE.
Feel like your heart has grown back, which makes it easier to forgive yourself for doing things like taking two hours to finish a meal because you either keep getting distracted or can’t stop talking.
Reread one of your favorite essays by one of your favorite authors. Having had plenty of coworkers you knew online before you met them in person during the pandemic, you wonder what they must’ve thought upon meeting you. Were they disappointed by your shyness?
Wonder if everyone you’ve met after befriending or becoming close to over Twitter or text actually hated you after meeting you in person.
Wonder if you would be able to get any of them to admit it, then realize they have actually complained to your face about how intense you are in real life — without you and they realizing that’s what they were doing.
Wonder if anyone really likes you, or just the simulacrum you decided you had to make of yourself.
Reach out to friends who knew you before you tried to build that simulacrum of yourself. Talk openly about how you feel instead of pretending you’re completely fine. Let them see you, and let yourself see them.
Don’t buy this because whatever, you’re aging. Let your face be ravaged by time, to paraphrase Marguerite Duras.
But start washing your face more, finally.
Wonder if you’ll ever be able to play the piano from this song.
Realize that you have yourself hated people you met online when you met them in person, mostly because their online persona was so horrible and their in-person persona was so meek you realized what true cowardice looked like.
Think about how much you love Amy Tan, and how much you liked that she and Stephen King clearly hung out because he quotes her as giving him the idea for the book, On Writing.
Wonder if you’ll ever read a Stephen King book, and how you got away with not doing so for long.
Work on your novel and get caught up in the craft. Come up with new and exciting solutions to problems you couldn’t even admit the book had. Find that every time you are bored, it’s time for one of these solutions.
Soon, the end of the process feels like Xeno’s Paradox, with every little “boring” bit fixed with a new solution, every time.
But actually, it works. Hear about an agency that looks for authors who can draw as well. Remember the video and wonder if you’ll ever be good enough of an artist to see your work in books.
Remember Quentin Blake.
Start painting with gouache with more confidence, enough to know your brushes are mostly for delicate watercolors, and you need to fix that.
Think about how the Xeno’s Paradox metaphor is also the one you use for your relationships — how you always thought they were 50-50, but they’re mainly about the last 3-5% that people go back and forth on meeting between. Sometimes you have to go 2%, sometimes 6%, but usually it’s 3-5%.
Realize that with friends, as with work, as with family, you sometimes do something like 43%.
Be surprised that even when you’re sick, tired, and scared about the future, you don’t need more than 8-10% at most.
Wonder about some friends need way more than that, and it never occurred to you not to give it to them until just now.
Wonder how you took a feelings problem and turned it into a math problem.
Realize that all that what your friends thinking or doing makes fixing problems in your book way easier.
Realize that it makes writing way harder. It makes finishing near impossible.
But you’ll do it. Eventually. Okay, at the end of the month — because that’s when that agency closes its submissions for the year.
Change the font of your novel into Comic Sans. Write and edit even faster.
Realize how much your last draft included a lot of implying feelings, not actually describing them. Think about how much easier that used to be in your first novel, the one that went nowhere but seemed to predict half your life.
Realize how much the ADHD medicine made it to understand other people’s feelings but not your own, and how you much prefer your own.
Actually cry about one of the characters because you’re really worried about them. Will they ever be happy?
In the book they will.
In real life, I’m not quite sure.