What Would We Be Without Wishful Thinking?
Fill up your mind with all it can hold.
I haven’t been unemployed since 1999, but I am now.
It’s not exactly my choice. On Wednesday morning I was going about my morning routine: sitting on the couch, drinking coffee, and watching reruns of “The Facts of Life” for a couple of hours before forcing myself to log in for the day.
I got a text around 9:20 from the head of my department, telling me he’d added a mandatory meeting to my calendar and I was late.
First, in the nearly five years I had the job, no one ever texted me. Two, I’ve only had one interaction with said department head. Last summer I raised a stink when he didn’t even give me an interview for another writing position in the department. Several of my co-workers were also overlooked, so he met with each of us to placate, promise mentorships and work opportunities that would never happen, and return us to churning out copy like bots.
So, I hopped on the call, thinking maybe he was finally getting around to fulfilling some promises from that long-ago meeting.
He was with some dude from HR. We had enough time for me to hear words like “department reorg,” “position eliminated,” and “severance package” before the tech department killed my computer.
I was late to my own firing.
I’ve worked since I was 14. My times of unemployment are limited to my first semester of college and my first nine months in St. Louis when I was adjusting to a new city, moving my whole life, and planning my wedding before I started culinary school.
Honestly, I needed to be fired. Not necessarily because I was a bad employee, at least according to my reviews. But my god, I hated it every day. Even though it was good, as far as corporate jobs go. I was remote and never set foot in the office. Mostly, I set my own hours. The work was mind-numbingly simple. Pay and benefits were agreeable. I showed up, hit the quota of articles most weeks, relieved when I could walk away and forget the job existed every weekend.
So why did I cry in the shower that afternoon? And have an absolute total meltdown while unsuccessfully trying to make a pie on Friday?
For one, I’ve never been fired or laid off. I internalize everything, so I spent the first day questioning everything I did, wondering how I screwed up so badly (I didn’t) and what kind of trouble I was in (I wasn’t).
Very quickly, though, despite the second-guessing and crying and meltdowns, I knew I’d been given an opportunity.
I’d already been casually looking for a job. A week earlier I learned I made it exceptionally far in the hiring process for a position with the Southern Poverty Law Center (dream job) from a pool of over 1,600 applicants. So I guess my resume and cover letter are pretty good.
Two days before the firing, a recruiter contacted me about a food-writing job that looked really interesting, but I passed because it was a contractor position. I sent her a polite and friendly email and asked her to remember me if something full-time came across her desk.
Yeah, I backpedaled pretty fast and emailed her on Wednesday.
The shock and sadness and insult quickly wore off. The anger probably won’t, but it’s more of an anger at the way Corporate America functions. The cold, brutal nature of the layoff being a fine example of the expendability of workers. From the start, I knew I wasn’t a good fit in that world. A big part of me feels like they opened the gate and now I’m running free.
My god, I love it.
I’m privileged to have my healthcare coverage in place already. I have [redacted] weeks of severance pay. Now that I’m doing more than casually job-searching, I’m seeing so many other options, especially for freelancers. I’m pretty sure I need to return to that life. It had hard parts but ultimately, working for myself is the way I work best.
I’ve been gifted with time to focus on my own writing projects.
Gifted with time to get my house in order. Literally and figuratively.
Time to get back to the pool for the first time since getting my knees fixed.
Yesterday I went out, thinking I’d camp out at a coffeehouse and write. That’s always a challenge with the weekend brunch crowd. And then I remembered I don’t have cram my writing in on weekends.
Today, I stayed home. Slept in. Returned to the pie crust I abandoned on Friday (and broke my ceramic rolling pin, but that was from cold dough, not rage). Watched “Purple Rain” with Woody snoozing on my chest. Even though yesterday was a bit of a struggle to find a place to write, I still managed to finish the first drafts of my Woody Guthrie Poets entry for this year (a week after the theme was announced instead of the weekend before the deadline).
Since my last New Orleans trip I’ve been trying to grab the time and energy to rewrite my book’s manuscript. I have that now. And I am so happy to get back into it.
I have travel planned. A lot of travel in April and May. Seems I can still afford the trips, and I no longer have to juggle my PTO time, work when I’m in another city, or rush to get back for work.
The first weekend in April, I’m off to Kansas City to see Jack White and my kid. Then Chicago for Mike Watt, two Jeff Tweedy shows, and hopefully, some time on stage reading a poem at The Green Mill. At the end of April, I’m road-tripping to New Orleans with stops in Memphis and Oxford, Mississippi along the way, which no longer have to be crammed in so I don’t run out of paid time off.
Back on Halloween in New Orleans, a fortune teller told me I’d be seeing 11:11 on clocks a lot. It had started a few months before she told me, but now I catch it at least once on most days.
I’ve never understood how prayer, manifestation, or any of that stuff works. That’s a me problem—I’ve never been much of a spiritual person, other than noticing moments of serendipity and its ability to bring the right people into my life.
But since Halloween, when I catch 11:11, I stop, close my eyes. My hand seems to find its way to my heart without me thinking about it every time. “I manifest everything I want,” I think, breathing so my chest moves my hand.
“I want…” is usually followed by abstractions
Peace
A calm mind
Time
Connection
Losing my job is what I manifested. And I’m perfectly fine with that.
I have big changes I want to make in my life. Changes that terrify me. Finding different work was one of the changes I wanted to make, although I never mentioned it during my one-minute manifestation moments.
I needed to be kicked out of the nest. Thank god someone finally did it.
11:11 ❤️