A Door Closes

At midlife, I have finally managed to do something trendy: get fired.
Laid off is the term employed last week, when I became unemployed. Cause it’s not really about my performance. Apparently it’s about the lack of advertising revenue at the upscale magazine where I toiled. It turns out that Katie Couric was not kidding when she reported on all those job losses.
Yup, I had heard about the recession—the one that affects other people. This week it’s different. Now that I’m the one who was canned, I’ve got a pretty good sense of the stories behind the numbers. Certainly you’ve read about those numbers, like the ones reported in the Daily News on May 28. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits is now in its 17th record week in a row.
Since I had read about this happening to other people, I knew some of what to do. I had seen all those “when you get fired” feature stories in the newspapers. So I was ready, right there in the middle of my worst conversation ever, to ask for my severance package in writing. I felt like a champ then, like I had passed a little Life Test, but then later I forgot to pick up the piece of paper. I guess I will forgive myself: my brain has been swirling with worries, like how I was going to pay the mortgage and why I ever went into journalism in the first place.
Maybe I did not do such a hot job of hitting all the right notes, but neither did anybody else. It turns out that what we really need is a few feature stories on what the rest of you should and should not do when I get fired—or when it happens to someone you love, or even just like.
Here are my tips on how the un-fired should respond:
∙ Do not tell me it’s going to be better in the long run. You don’t know that, I don’t know that. Only God knows that—and she’s probably not focusing on my job search, what with so much of her time being spent on the Middle East.
∙ But do say something. The only people I hate this week are the ones who were silent; especially the upper-echelon folks I worked with for a long time (seemed longer than it was). They should have made a phone call or dropped by my office to say something, however inadequate or untruthful. Show some class, people.
∙ Don’t expect me to concentrate. I haven’t been this distracted since my romantic breakup of 2002. This time I got dumped by a media company instead of Mr. Wrong, but the physical shock is the same. I cannot concentrate on anything, which maybe is a good thing. I especially cannot concentrate on your whining about your job, cause I keep thinking how ungrateful you are that you still have one.
My mood goes back and forth. Sometimes I think that everything really will be okay, sometimes not. In a darker moment one night I told my mom that I was probably going to shoot myself. “I don’t really think you should do that,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the answer yet.”
I love my mom and I’m taking her advice, but the “yet” reminds me that these are tough times in a tough town.