it was hard to feel sorry for me because I had so much going for me. Again, the cable company wasn’t taking checks for “stuff I have going for me.”
Plus, there was almost a hierarchy of pity surrounding a city of laid-off people. Many people talked about how badly they felt for “breadwinners”—a.k.a. men with families who had to feed their children and put them through private school. As a single and childless woman with a mortgage, just FYI, I was, and continue to be, the breadwinner in my home, too.
It was like an onslaught of weird advice that Lucy from Peanuts gave to Charlie Brown from her psychiatric booth, and at the time, I simply wasn’t in the mood for, or buying into, it.
Not quite yet anyway, though I was soon to be born again myself.
All the sentiment led to some layoff takeaway that probably goes against the grain of most self-help thinking: Nobody wants to hear the easy-to-offer hypothetical bright side when they are drenched in self-pity and drowning in uncertainty. I did not. I just wanted to soak in my own agony for a while, so I could feel it, and sort through my personal crisis, however great or small it was to someone else; I wanted to acknowledge the pain of it all before taking action to fix it.
Perhaps friends, or society, or whatever we are collectively, don’t want to deal with the discomfort of such a situation. But, looking back, avoiding the struggle that I was feeling wasn’t the answer. Not for me. And not now that I’ve gone through it.
My advice today? When a friend is having a hard time, let her cry it out. Acknowledge: This sucks. Feel it with her. Don’t skimp on agreeing. Tell her, “You have every right to be upset. Take a few days, eat potato chips for breakfast. Stay in your pajamas and watch back-to-back Law & Order repeats. (I have heard that that is a thing…from, uh, a friend.) Feel the sting. Don’t avoid it or look for the sunny side until you’re ready.”
Nobody in crisis needs to hear that it could be worse.
Nobody needs to hear that their anxiety isn’t worthy of a sob fest.
Irrational Panic
In the months that followed getting laid off, I went on thirty-one job interviews. It was a challenging time. It felt like musical chairs. There were jobs, then a chair was pulled away and there were fewer options out there.
People were rapidly getting laid off, dropping like flies. This led me to face the realization that returning to a position in television news, at a certain level on the ladder, was going to be even more of a challenge than I’d thought when the hammer first came down.
I remember a former colleague named Peggy called me the afternoon we’d all gotten the axe because she’d heard about the cutbacks. She connected me with people at her network, and within days, I went in for an interview. I was feeling optimistic. For like five minutes. After lots of initial enthusiasm, I didn’t hear anything back. Why? They had all gotten laid off, too. That didn’t happen just once. It was like dominos at that time, and I was struggling to get out in front of it.
I went for four interviews at a major cable network for a single job. It was a job that I had been qualified for a decade earlier, but still, it was a job and, as my mother might have said, beggars can’t be choosers. It was a morning-show gig and I had done my homework. By the time the fourth and final job interview came around (which meant four different outfits, a stressor for me, by the way), I had spent the week watching the show and charting the segments they had aired. I recorded the competition each day and did the same there, then I compared everything and made notes on each network’s choices and what I might have done differently had I been producing.
I felt ready to take on that final interview, prepared, fully versed on the news of the week, the anchors of the show, and more.
When, halfway through the interview, one of the anchors asked me if I had watched that day, and what I might have done differently had I been producing, I was immediately thrilled because I had watched and I had several suggestions. Then I panicked. I couldn’t remember a single thing. It had not crossed my mind to bring my pages of notes into the meeting.
My mind was suddenly empty.
Nerves frayed from the trauma of studying, finding new things to wear, and making sure I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, I blanked.
Full. On. Blanked.
And suddenly so frantic was I that recovery was 100 percent impossible.
“I did watch,” I said to the room full of people awkwardly waiting to hear, “but I can’t remember anything right now.”
It was all the more tragic because it sounded like every unemployed producer on the planet had applied for that job, and as I understood it, it was down to the final two, me being one. I stumbled through the rest of my interview, mortified and humiliated, and after I left, I didn’t make it out the door of that building before bursting into tears.
I was buckling under the pressure of the search.
But the Universe must have had plans for me. What was it telling me? That was very unclear.
Once it became painfully obvious that a real job wasn’t going to happen fast, and once I learned what severance-plus-unemployment-plus-subsidies-from-my-mom were going to look like and how grim the job market was, I made a budget and instituted my own austerity program.
Molton Brown soap was sadly the first indulgence to go. Ivory bar soap would do just fine. All subscriptions to magazines and newspapers went away too—canceled immediately. Instead, the nail salon downstairs in my building served as a de facto library, and I would go and sit there to find out which stars were, in fact, just like us. I snatched my neighbors’ discarded newspapers, and I curated a list of user logins from friends for major newspapers online and premium TV channels. Pride went out the door.
I initiated a one-pump rule for all remaining soap-like products—shampoo, conditioner, face wash, and moisturizer. No more mindlessly pumping a handful of liquid; I was on a budget. Every once in a while, when I was feeling blue or neglected, I’d hesitantly treat myself to a second pump. I stopped taking cabs. I stopped taking classes.
I sold some stuff, including a pole-dancing pole I had installed in the second bedroom. I had jumped on the popular pole-dancing-class bandwagon (to feel empowered, I was told). Class was super fun and physically challenging, but while most people could climb to the top of the pole in class, I found I could not. I would slide down and not be able to do the flip at the top—or all the good moves that came with hoisting oneself to the ceiling.
I didn’t feel empowered, I felt pissed-off. So, I bought a pole and had it installed in my apartment so I could practice climbing at home. Competitive much? (I never made it to the top. Not once.)
So, along with fancy soap, I said goodbye to the pole and the pricey classes that went with it.
Shopping was no longer an activity for me either, unless it was mission-critical. I canceled my gym membership and the trainer, too. For the first time in my life, I priced out items like toilet paper and paper towels, and almost daily did a cash tally, measuring out just how far I could stretch things if the worst happened and I found no work.
In hindsight, I perhaps unnecessarily catastrophized the situation. And to this day, I’m a catastrophizer, thanks to the worry of not having a regular paycheck.
I braced for the worst.
My severance ran out on March 27,
