At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend confided she was soon to be laid off from a job she loved, at a company where she’d worked for more than 25 years. She was adamant about how great it was going be to take some time off for the first time in her adult life.
“Yeah,” I said, “but that first Monday — when you wake up and the rest of the world is heading to work, and you’re not — is kind of tough.”
No, no, she insisted, the day couldn’t come soon enough.
I regretted having spoken. If there are stages of reacting to losing a longtime job akin to the Kubler-Ross stages of coping with death (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), my friend and I were at very different points on the continuum.
My layoff had come a year earlier, on the day Chesley Sullenberger landed in the Hudson, an event I might have glimpsed had I been looking out my office window rather than at the faces of a stream of colleagues, etched with sorrow at my sacking and relief that it hadn’t been them. Until then I’d spent 21 happy years working as a book editor in major publishing houses, the last 10 as editorial director of an imprint.
We all knew change was coming. The book market had been disastrous, and our corporation had undertaken a major reorganization, folding divisions into others. Either realistic or paranoid enough to consider myself a prime target, I’d begun taking personal items home a few weeks before.
Still, it hurt. Nobody likes having decisions made for them.
I’d received the news the evening before. The moment my immediate supervisor, a woman 12 years my junior, closed the door behind her, I knew what was happening. It was in the air; I’d felt the dark wings beating above my head. She told me the basics of my severance, and whom in human resources to contact in the morning.
I thanked her. I told her I’d make a list of authors and literary agents who should be contacted. I later realized she already had that list in the folder in her hand. My autopsy had already been performed.
My skull buzzed like a tuning fork. I made small talk with a colleague, and took a call from an author, in as blithe a manner as I could manage. I was glad to have been a given a few hours of private knowledge. This is how I talk when I’m fired.
I took a cab home. I never talk to taxi drivers, but for some reason told this one what had happened. I had to say it out loud. He was sympathetic — he’d started driving after his own firing some years before — and offered to comp me for the ride. I declined, and tipped heavy.
As soon as I got home I opened a Gmail account. For years I’d used my work e-mail account for everything. Now I no longer had one.
Up and at ’em
Next day the word was out, followed by the consolations and the calls. I spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day alone in the office packing a two-decade career into boxes. I returned only once more, briefly, before a let’s-take-Bruce-out-for-a-drink event. We had one round, hugged and promised to keep in touch and went home.
It was the middle of winter, it was the middle of my life, and I didn’t have a clue. I was on my own.
I pumped myself with thoughts of new starts and reinvention, but — as I tried to warn my friend at dinner — on that first Monday morning, and quite a few mornings after, I faced the void, big-time. The body and mind do not let go of that many years of habit without a fight. I awoke each day geared to do the things I’d always done: rush in for a meeting, give a presentation, do battle with an author’s agent. Then I’d realize I wasn’t doing any of those things today. I didn’t even have to get out of bed. I lay there and felt the world rushing forward without me.
But rise I did — even on that first stomach-turning Monday — because I had appointments. Lots of them. I’m pretty solitary by nature, not much of a schmoozer, but everyone said networking was the key to landing on your feet, so I went at it like a maniac: lunches, coffees, drinks and office visits with every publishing professional who called or e-mailed to wish me well, and with others who didn’t. There was comfort in feeling that network of support, but it was all as rushed and disorienting as speed-dating. The insights I gleaned ranged from “Act now, they’ll soon turn the page” to “You have to take this time for yourself,” though by far the most common message was an unspoken: “Don’t look to me for a job; I’m barely hanging on myself.”
After some hesitation, I enrolled in the three months of outplacement service that came with my severance package. Arriving for orientation felt like being processed at Ellis Island or an internment camp. I sat in a packed room filling out forms with my raw-nerved new peers, most of them from the financial world.
There were online seminars and role-play interview classes. Each week I met with a consultant, who acted as both shrink and parole officer, and with a team of other job-seekers, grouped by field and salary expectation. We’d pick apart each other’s resumes and share tales of the hunt. Some weeks it felt like a 12-step meeting, others more like tribal council on “Survivor.” Whenever someone “landed” — actually managed to get a job — they brought doughnuts for the room. I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test and learned I was artsy and intuitive and would make a good librarian.
I interviewed when there were publishing jobs to interview for. But it wasn’t often, and wasn’t easy. It had been years since I’d been on that side of the desk, and masking fear and neediness with self-confidence and charm took more effort than I’d anticipated. (Memo to those I’ve interviewed in the past: I had no idea how awful it is to watch someone frown at your resume. Forgive me.)
I volunteered briefly at a news and opinion Web site that was cannily tapping the growing pool of “seasoned” (read: old) but unemployed publishing talent. The idea was that these jobless execs would learn Web skills in exchange for things like copy editing and proofreading.
I showed up at the office the day a national news show was taping a piece about this “executive intern” program. (“These people, once at the top of their game in the publishing world . . .”) Like many a media-besotted idiot, I wagged my tail when the pretty blond reporter pointed the mike my way, and found myself staring into the camera and saying, in a “To Tell the Truth” voice, “I’m Bruce Tracy, I’m 52, and I’m an intern!”
When I left the office, I wondered what I’d done.
Things could have been worse. I’d known that from the get-go. I was healthy; I had no dependents and little debt. I had a loving and supportive partner with a solid business and a health-care plan that could cover me.
But while I knew that this frenzy of networking and interviewing was the only sensible route to another job, on an almost physical level it felt wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be doing this. I was supposed to be at work. Perhaps it was complacency, perhaps it was entropy, perhaps it was ego, but deep down I couldn’t shake a slightly indignant sense that all this opportunity chasing now incumbent upon me was something that by dint of endurance I had earned the right to leave behind. “I am,” my heartbeat insisted. Not “I want to be.”
The realities of book publishing, however, told a different story. Even before the industry began imploding, being an editor had been a young person’s game. The ranks thin sharply after 40, even more so after 50. I knew that, I told myself; I should have prepared.
Then my mother died, after a long illness. I spent time in my hometown with family and loved ones. When I returned to the city I finished my term with outplacement, but under the weight of grief and self-pity the networking and interviewing slowed to a stop. Six months after being laid off, I felt inert, disconnected from the world. I couldn’t bear to enter a bookstore or, for a while, pick up a book. I avoided any social setting where the question “What do you do?” was likely to arise. I feared I’d never work again.
The physical and psychological effects of unemployment are well-documented — and not pretty. Without the sructure and social support the workplace provides, self-esteem can plummet, and depression and substance abuse can rise. I knew this, and made a point of increasing my time at the gym, monitoring what I ate and drank, and finding a good therapist.
But as much as I tried to do the right things, the feeling of having lost the thing that defined me lingered. Every train of thought detoured to the same destination: “You don’t have a job.”
Moving forward
None of this surprises David McDowell, a Manhattan psychiatrist whose patients include many high-functioning professionals who’ve lost long-held positions. As many others have learned amid the recession, such a loss is a devastating blow to our sense of self, he told me.
“Freud said work and love are the cornerstones of our humanness — and as Americans we live in a society in which we are defined by what we do,” he said.
And it’s a loss we’re not socially or societally equipped to deal with, he adds.
“We don’t have the kind of language and rituals — no funeral, no visitation, no sitting shiva — that attend a death,” he says. “As a result, when you are unemployed, you’re invisible. When you reach out, people may feel you are asking for something they cannot give.”
Recently I called Cheryl, the warm and brilliant lady who’d been my outplacement consultant. I asked if the sense of dislocation I’d felt was greatest among those losing jobs they’d held for a long time.
“Absolutely,” she said. “I think there are indeed something like Kubler-Ross stages of reaction to job loss, and the longer you’ve stayed in a position, the longer those stages might take to pass.”
Those who loved their work can have the hardest time of all, she said. For them, the key to moving forward often involves separating the content of the work they loved from the context, which they had lost.
Which is sort of what happened to me.
Last summer I was contacted by a young writer, under contract to write his first book, who felt his editor couldn’t give him the attention he needed. He knew I’d specialized in the kind of book he was writing, and asked if I’d take a look at it. I worked with him, and we were both delighted with the outcome. That job led to others, which in turn led to others, and before I knew it I was busy enough as a freelance editor and ghostwriter to have to decline work on occasion.
I found I was able to reclaim the content of work I most loved — working with writers — outside the corporate context. I had found a new context where my years of experience were an asset rather than a liability. And I was really, really enjoying it.
On her first day of unemployment, my friend — the one who announced her layoff at the dinner party — posted as her Facebook status “is happy!” and I sincerely hope that’s true. For me, it obviously wasn’t that simple. The day I was fired, a wise friend and former colleague e-mailed: “A hard moment, but you will come out of it in better shape sooner rather than later.”
It felt a lot more like later than sooner, but ultimately, he was right. Getting up in the morning is different these days. I no longer feel lost. Nor, for that matter, do I have that sense I had for so many years, of hurtling myself out the door and into an upstream swim toward success. I wake up knowing the strength and satisfaction of my work lie in me. They always did. The day is mine.