How to Lose Your Job (and Your Intestines) in 10 Days

On redefining yourself when you are simply no longer...you.

This is the fourth issue of Bite Back, a new newsletter by Tess Koman.

My career has always been very easy and joyful to explain. First, after years of interning at magazines and pop culture sites, I was a baby editor at Cosmo. Then I was an associate editor with bylines at lots of other cool places too. Next, I blew up at Delish. After that, I was somehow running Serious Eats—a huge step up and away from my forward-facing, Disney-centric role, but one I was very fucking proud of. Now? Uh.

“Your job is to prep for surgery,” my colorectal surgeon tells me when I end up back in the ER the day after I was laid off in January, very sad and fully obstructed. “Your job now is to recover,” my other colorectal surgeon tells me the day after that surgery. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” my pulmonologist says when I end up crying to him from my hospital bed a few days later about my joblessness (and not totally about my pulmonary hypertension as it pertained to the 20 scary and new pounds of post-op fluid I was retaining all around my body/my lungs lol).

two days post-lay-off, young wild n free

How we got here

In line with the Girl Boss Era laws in effect from 2013-2019, I spent the first 10 years of my career caring almost exclusively about being good at my cool job (see: “intertwining my self-worth with forward trajectory in my career to the point that the two became inextricable,” blah blah). I spent the next five attempting that extrication, focusing hard on boosting up others and working on projects that I hoped might advance my career while knowing that was unlikely to be the case, blah blah blah. Over the last three of those years, I put a lot of time and energy into the de-programming that was written into effect by those same lady pioneers just a few months into COVID: “Thou girl-bossed too close to the sun, you fucking idiots. Where did you get that idea? Your self-worth can have nothing to do with your career, they should be entirely separate or else you’re part of the problem,” blah, blah, BLAH, blah, blah, etc., etc.

…So I had been trying not to do that anymore. Until a whole bunch of medical professionals who really know their shit told me in those very certain terms that my job was to claw my way back from many consecutive months of straight medical trauma; to do whatever I needed to do to get back to healthy-ish-ness again. And they told me that without knowing I’d just been terminated.

Woof.

How we’re doing right now

I know people get laid off all the time. I know it was miraculous I’d gone 15 years in media without having been one of those people! I knew the formulaic and emotionless motions to expect from the company because of many of my industry friends’ experiences and I knew my immediate reaction would go from so sad to so mad from what I’d seen on TikTok. I know all of these things and I experienced each one as expected. What I didn’t know to prepare for was the humiliation. I was mortified.

I’d spent the past weeks at work (and months prior from the hospital) convincing everyone that I was fiiIIIIIIIIne, only to have a team of people—my team of people!— understand at the exact same moment that I really, really was not. My husband catches me the second HR signs off, the millisecond before the crying starts. ”You will handle this much better because you are at your lowest right now,” he assures as I start to collapse into him: “If you’d been doing so great these past few months, this would’ve hit you a lot harder.”

I proceeded to weep with anger and sadness that whole day. I woke up the next morning obstructed and just kept weeping. Not only because I was in awful, familiar pain, but also because, as their go-to NG tube insertion and PICC line drugging distractions, everyone I’d come to know while living on that decrepit hospital wing was going to ask me how work was going. What weird and wild thing had I accomplished since I’d last seen them, they always wanted to know? Was I still the world’s premiere food-less food editor? Ha ha! I was the one who told them about Alka-Seltzer in cheese sauce or something last time? Yeah?? I sat in the ER awaiting re-admission, crying still, preemptively mortified. It was so embarrassing how unrecognizable I’d become these past few months. I was so embarrassed.

i remember thinking ‘this is profound’ right before we headed to the ER lol

What we’re (maybe) trying to do about it

Why does the idea of just existing in this nebulous, time-sucking recovery phase continue to bother me more than not having a “real job?” How am I supposed to advance my career when I took a haaard professional left from ‘promising editor’ to ‘sad, perma-shitting sicko?’ Jesus!! You hear it too, right? I can’t even admit that I need to recover. Or that it’s most important to! (I do know why I can’t just feel grateful for this time, though.) It’s a fucking sickness on top of a fucking sickness!!

I asked Dartmouth’s Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine Dr. Jessica K. Salwen-Deremer about this very upsetting recovery-centric shame spiral in an attempt to…package it for this particular (unpaid :) ) side hustle I couldn’t help but start. She, of course, is not surprised to hear that I am struggling with the categorization of recovery as my job and that I am still reeling from the lay-off months later while I am stuck at home shitting myself constantly. “Just because more of you needs to be allocated to wellness at the moment, you're still a human,” she says. “You have a curious brain and intellectual curiosity that needs to be satiated. A hyper-focus on recovery creates stress and hyper-vigilance around your symptoms, so that simply can not be your only job.”

And that’s all well and good (no, really — I am thrilled for the insight!!), but it doesn’t not feel isolating. And guilt-making. And even like spitting in the face of a luxury I have that others do not. Like, yes, I have to focus on motherhood and job-hunting, but with the rest of my time, I’m allowed to work through trauma?? Both physical and emotional? What kind of an ass wouldn’t be thrilled to be afforded that kind of time!?

I asked Melissa Randazzo if this tracks for her too. Melissa is not only a social worker by day, but she’s also the founder/owner/100 percent-of-everything of True Warrior Jewelry by night. She’s a mother of two who has stage four endometriosis and is fresh on the heels of a hysterectomy and other debilitating surgeries and procedures. I thought she might be able to speak to, I don’t know, the mixed bags of high-stakes emotions that come with medical trauma and chronic pain continually inserting forced pauses into a full life and a meaningful career. She (gently) stops me at the top of the call: “I hate that you frame [recovery] as a luxury.” The social worker in her insists I try to refrain from phrasing it like that, as the sooner I realize I “deserve and have to relax, the sooner [I] will get better.”

Still, it’s almost impossible not to define yourself by the breaks you are involuntarily taking, whether it’s from work, from snack time, from everything: “I get up because I have to. I put on makeup, I get dressed. I do it every day because that's what makes me feel normal,” Melissa says. “And so when I need to stop everything and people say, ‘well, you look fine’ and I portray this happy person on social media because I think I can trick my brain into thinking ‘everything’s going to be OK,’ you really do start to believe you've ruined everything you touch somehow by attempting to take care of yourself.”

If you find yourself dealing with a huge and/or sudden identity realignment like I am or like Melissa is, Dr. Salwen-Deremer insists that, first of all: “Persistent positivity does not leave room for grief. Loss and sadness are really important to go through if you're feeling them.” OK. So.

I can try to sit here with the fact that I am not my usual Cool Job-having self right now, and that I haven’t been for a while. I can sit here. I can sit here and let myself get a little darker and deeper. I can sit here, crying as I write this, and let that crack me in half while I begin to accept that I will never really be able to divorce my self-worth from those jobs. I can sit here and realize with a very confident sense of foreboding, that that means I may never be able to define myself as a cool and exciting person ever again. (Like, babe, in this economy?? A job is simply not going to happen, let alone a sexy one!)

Oh god. Oh GOD.

The truth of it is, “we don’t return to baseline [after the loss of something like, idk, an organ, or a sense of self], usually,” Dr. Salwen-Deremer says. At least not when “we're figuring out what this body can do and wants to do. But that period of grief for your ‘old self’ can also be one of discovery,” she continues. She believes, as with grief, coming to terms with a new normal takes a full year of experiences: “You need a year of holidays and birthdays and failed hiking trips and like airplane rides that are terrible as your new self. And the first round of each of them is not gonna be fun.”

And then? “You’ve got new perspective.”

looking at my children the other day with all my new perspective

How we’re eating through it

As I continue to sit here mourning desserts, I find moments of pleasure in…boiled vegetables. An over-boiled carrot—one soft enough to melt in my mouth rather than get caught in my intestines—can be salty, sweet, simple, and, I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I haven’t steamed zucchini since Eloise was five months old? Or that I’ve never just…steamed myself zucchini? But the ability to get a vegetable down without fear? One that my child also believes to be a that-moment-in-Ratatouille-type experience? A joy, really. Don’t ask me about broccoli, though. I didn’t do it like I said I would lmfao.

Oh! And welcome to my new YouTube series, also titled Bite Back. I’m embedding the first “episode” below. Each week, the protagonist will check things off her sad, NPO-times cravings list, relishing in her return to food while transitioning into this bizarre new phase of her life. It’s a tale of woe and remorse and revenge and triumph and so much fucking dairy, obv. She deserves it, ya know? And she is thrilled to be fucking back. It’s just the culmination of 43279483 years and traumas and self-doubts in the making, it’s no big deal, I didn’t cry at all while putting it together. Lmk what you think, my beloved sick fucks!! :) :)

Art by Amanda Suarez