There’s a first time for everything…having sex, making love (yes, there is a difference!), buying your first car, losing your first tooth, signing the lease on your first apartment…..
Yup, I’ve experienced all the “firsts” above, and now, for the first time ever I am “Laid Off and Unemployed”.
For all those late 20-something year olds and mid-30-year olds and even late-30 and early-40-year olds… heck, for EVERYONE who has ever been in life or career transition, I dedicate this first post to you!
In February of 2009, I was Laid Off. I write that with capital letters because of the significance of this event in my life. I had never been unemployed nor underemployed in my 31 years. Summers between high school and college years, I worked — telemarketing, department store retail, Halloween costume warehouse stocking, biochemistry research lab work– and within a month of graduating from undergrad and grad school, I landed jobs. Being laid off and unemployed is a state of being that I don’t recommend for everyone (eg you have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay). But after the initial reaction of anxiety and fervent job-hunting and networking panic, I’ve realized it is an experience that I am grateful for.
Isn’t it strange how for some of us, forced unemployment becomes a liberating event? Myself included? So many of us go through life doing what we “should”, following the linear path that we or our parents or society designed for us back in high school or college. So many of us follow habits and patterns of living. It takes a major event like being laid off to force ourselves to ask, is this what we really want? Is this the lifestyle that we really want to live? Are we happy “enough” living this way? Or are we living in a default, status-quo mode and could we be living a more fulfilling life?
So being laid off was the wake-up call for me. I realized that I wasn’t feeling completely fulfilled, that I had been searching for a new career not only b/c my old career wasn’t fulfilling, but also b/c my life wasn’t fulfilling. I had fallen into the pattern of work, gym, occasionally hanging out w/ friends or significant other to watch a Netflix movie or eating a meal, and repeat.
Why do I feel more energized after being laid off?
I broke my pattern. Every day I do something different, and I am learning and reading and writing about subjects that I have always wanted to learn, read, and write about, but never made the time to do b/c I was in default mode! I can assure you, these types of changes are electrifying to the mind!
Re-awakening the mind: often we fall into easy patterns of play and work, but sometimes what we need to make us feel alive again is to awaken the mind! Not that our professions don’t supply intellectual stimulation…or that watching TV or movies with friends isn’t entertaining… but maybe, like taking vitamins and eating our veggies, creative “work” like reading, writing, studying foreign language, playing a musical instrument, and immersing ourselves in unfamiliar fields of knowledge not related to our profession are actions we can take to energize us!
For example, last week I borrowed my housemate’s book, On Learning to Write. The author states, everyone is born knowing how to write. That we lose our desire to write because of fear of rejection, criticism, “rustiness” of the writing muscle. I decided that I would write 1000 words per day. On any topic. Without hesitation or fear of being mediocre or just plain boring. I haven’t quite met my goal, but in trying, I feel my writing muscles getting stronger already!
Unemployed… laid off… a little scared… but also excited at the possiblities… and embarking on a journey…
