That’s when hope died and panic set in.
When I went on unemployment, as per some official New York State policy, I had to go downtown to a state-run resume seminar. I won’t lie: I was heading in there with serious attitude. I couldn’t believe I had to endure the humiliation of learning to make a resume. Uh, I got this. I don’t need a seminar. I wanted to spend the time looking for jobs. But, to my surprise, my irkedness paled in comparison to the rest of the crowd. My class was filled with Wall Street guys whose body language (arms crossed, no pen in hand, slouched down in their seat) made clear they were more pissed-off than I was to be there. They were wearing super fancy watches, beautifully tailored untucked striped shirts, and expensive sunglasses propped on top of their heads. And they weren’t happy. I realized then that, while my job loss sucked bad, they had further to fall than I did, financially speaking. It’s a long drop from a healthy seven figures to unemployment. I wondered what their austerity budgets looked like. I was giving up expensive hand soap. They were giving up second and third homes. Still, like the entire process, it was emotionally draining and completely demoralizing.
The professional trauma hit me hard. In fact, for many years, it was the driving force behind many of my life decisions. But, instead of assessing the circumstances around me that may have contributed, I looked inward: Here’s what’s wrong with you, and that is why you are here.
It took a decade to realize that landing thirty-one interviews in an employment crisis was an impressive feat. But, at the time, I didn’t know that. It didn’t feel impressive.
It felt desperate.
You Can Eat Your Dinner or Drink Your Dinner, But You Can’t Do Both
career
For one hot second, being a little chubby paid off. In fact, it was the impetus for career number two.
My battle with my weight started in my mid-twenties. Once I was introduced to the adult world of working all day, the culinary thrill that is New York City, and traveling and therefore eating out on a corporate card, a never-ending war with the scale began. I was a skinny enough kid, but as an adult, my weight could best be described as up and down like a toilet seat at a party. It probably always will be, try as I may to manage that struggle.
I had done some radical diets over the years, but pre-layoff, around 2006 or 2007, I decided to see a registered dietician on a weekly basis. As part of her process, I would write down my food in a journal each week and track my calories, a startling and painfully revealing exercise.
Did you know a Starbucks Vente skim latte has about 130 calories?
A quarter of an avocado has 100.
Each week, when I had my appointment, I had to show the nutritionist what I had been taking in. She had a lot of funny lines, including, after seeing my notes listing margaritas (plural) with a platter of Mexican food, “You can either eat your dinner or drink your dinner, but you can’t do both.”
Translation: If losing weight when you are on the south side of five foot two means consuming 1350 calories per day, not per meal, then using 500 or, okay, 750 of them on three drinks is problematic.
After hearing that particular line, I told her she should write a book. She told me she didn’t know how to write a book, so I trotted down to Barnes & Noble and bought a book on how to write a non-fiction book proposal to see if I could drag a book out of her. We teamed up, found an agent (Maura, still my agent today), and actually sold the proposal for Urban Skinny!
I still had my job at BusinessWeek at the time, so collaborating on a book was just what kids today call a side hustle.
Though I wrote that book while I was still employed, it wouldn’t hit the shelves for years, after I’d been laid off.
Broken and Breaking Free
After the thirty-one job interviews, seven months into my layoff, I did eventually get some challenging, albeit low-paying, full-time freelance work at the Wall Street Journal, developing and launching their live digital programming. It paid less than half of what I was making when I was laid off at BusinessWeek, but it truly was a blast. The people I worked with were clever, young, and entrepreneurial in a way I’d not experienced.
We were a good team, too—Lauren Goode and Kelly Evans and the crack-of-dawn shift that left us delirious. Despite the criminally early call time, we had some seriously good laughs, once with Kelly over my lack of even a basic understanding of how to make an Excel spreadsheet (I still have no clue), and frequently over an obsession Lauren and I had with some moisturizing hand lotion called Glysomed that you can only buy in Canada.
Five months later, a full year after getting laid off, I was finally offered two full-time, semi-interesting jobs, with benefits, in news. One was a continuation of my gig at the Wall Street Journal, and one involved doing something similar at Reuters.
Both were digital programming, not television per se. Of the two jobs, I had to take the Reuters one. It excited me the least but paid the most. It was a financial necessity, not a choice.
Anti-The Secret? Yes.
Pro-avoiding going broke? Also yes.
While I was grateful, and it was a tremendous relief to finally have the illusion of job stability, as I faced starting a new gig in my humbled and traumatized state, I knew it would be difficult. The simple reality was that I was gun-shy; my confidence had been broken. My half-assed vision board had done nothing to change that. I was visualizing the shit out of life, but mostly I was just worried that, no matter where I worked, I wouldn’t succeed.
Starting a new job is hard under any circumstances. It takes months before you know where the photocopier is, who is nice and who is not, how to change the way you work to fit a different culture than you might have experienced at a previous job. It’s hard to hit your stride at any job, let alone one you took out of desperation.
That job, that I had scrambled to land, that I went on thirty-one job interviews to find, was, at the very least, ill-fitting. Not only was it not what I would have chosen, but it didn’t feel like a productive or positive environment for a million reasons. And that added to my overall anxiety.
I knew five days into it that it was a bad fit. It wasn’t actually television. And, while the people I worked with were unquestionably the most dedicated and fun group of journalists I’d ever had the pleasure of working with, the job itself just was not for me.
Which brings me back to the vision board.
Just as I was deep in the throes of hating my new, not even one-year-into-it job, I joined up with a group of creative and like-minded women who had, by choice or by way of the recession, started working for themselves, all while trying to find their way in the murky waters of a new economy. Some had turned a side gig into a full-time gig, and some had been laid off and were trying to make a go of running their own businesses.
A lot of businesses were made that way. Companies still needed the services, but slashing headcounts was also still needed even as the recession slowed, so consulting—executing tasks once done in-house—became a thing. I’m not sure it was the start of the surge in the gig economy, but I suppose it helped, along with the fact that online
