Actor announcement! No—HUMAN announcement.

Some personal news.

As many of y’all know, I lost my job at the end of February. (The not very sordid, just sad, details are here.) As fewer of y’all know, I started a new job at the beginning of May. This job is pretty different from my previous one: for one, I’m back in the non-profit sector, which I wasn’t sure I’d ever do again. But, even more significantly, it’s part-time.

*record scratch* *freeze frame* yep, that’s me.

The tl;dr on that is quite simply that I really want to write.

Now, this is where I had planned to put the paywall, because this is all very personal. But then I figured that the people this might resonate with the most are probably not in their “another monthly subscription” era, so the paywall and emotional wall shall stay down for this one. If you are in a giving era, please consider a paid subscription, or buying me a cup of tea! There’s more paywalled stuff to come in the next couple of weeks!

---

This is how it went, by the numbers:

• 8 weeks of joblessness

• 16 job applications

• 7 rejections (1 within 24 hours!)

• 8 non-replies

• 1 interview—> 1 second-round interview—> 1 final interview—> 1 job offer

This is how it went, by the feelings:

The first week felt relatively normal, as though I was just taking the week off. My last day was a Monday, so that helped me feel anchored to something familiar. It wasn’t until the first post-job Monday that I actually felt the loss—of my position, of my routines, of everything that had felt familiar for the better part of a decade. So I let myself crash out, which included a two-hour angry nap in the middle of the afternoon.

This is precisely what happened to me.

Over the next few weeks, my sense of self felt a lot less solid than I was used to. I had to squirrel away every cent of my severance, because I had no idea what was next. And financial anxiety is, among other things, a spontaneity killer. The Dave Ramsey-style disgusted-judgment-disguised-as-financial-advice seeps in a little bit, so that the idea of going to a coffee shop feels irretrievably decadent. Grocery shopping suddenly became very fraught. So, too, did manicures and hair appointments, my regular little splurges that had become such an elemental part of my routine that they made me feel like myself. Once I took my braids out and switched to press-on nails, it was hard to look in the mirror and see anything but how diminished I felt for getting laid off.

Couldn’t get this voice out of my head and all. Can you imagine?

But despite that massive disruption, and the profound ambiguity re: what was waiting for me on the other side of my final severance check, I started to feel peaceful. I had a spreadsheet of daily and weekly activities—write a cover letter or part of an essay draft every day, leave the house at least three times a week, do morning yoga at least five times a week—that kept me occupied and grounded. My loved ones were always checking in on me, taking me out for meals and joining me for walks and planting seeds with me. And I had space, so much space, to devote to writing.

By a month in, I was really enjoying my work-life balance. Which is to say, not having a full-time job. It was a massive paradigm shift for me. I had never seriously considered looking for part-time work before, except when I was a full-time student and my scholarship only covered half my tuition. A part-time job at my big age had truly madly deeply not occurred to me before. But suddenly it was occurring like a motherfucker. I needed a job that could support my writing, not just financially, but with legitimate space and time.

With that paradigm shift behind me, I was now much more flexible on salary than I thought I’d be after seven years in the for-profit sector. But I was still inflexible on values alignment, because even if it’s only 20 hours a week, I need to be working on the right side of history. And I was newly inflexible about time and workload. And just as my new-found clarity narrowed my focus, this job came across my desk. Part-time, values-aligned, and paying me enough to feel okay about getting my hair done again.

Meanwhile, one of my press-on nails literally just popped off.

I am wildly lucky that I landed this job. My cohort of peers—specifically, people in the public policy world—is getting singled out and walloped by a vicious and vindictive administration. It’s a terrifying market; the quiet quitting of 2021 feels like 30 lifetimes ago. I’ve seen some iteration of “job market so bad I might as well follow my dreams,” and that feels exactly right. I got kicked into a mid-life crisis slightly ahead of schedule¹, and while I didn’t buy a gaudy car in a two-week colour, I nevertheless feel a bit dramatic. My final severance check has come and gone, and it’s even clearer now that I’ve no idea what’s waiting for me. But this step feels right, because it’s a step towards being this thing I’ve wanted to be my whole life.

And I’m due for a Moulin Rouge rewatch as well.

Many thanks to all of you for taking this step with me. I’m more grateful than I could possibly say.

1. Gifted kids, amirite?