my 3 biggest takeaways from the first 6 months of unemployment

Or: "What I'm Telling Myself As I Claw Back From the Bottom." :)

This is Bite Back, a newsletter from Tess Koman. One that was #9 on Substack’s ‘Rising Culture’ list last week too, I should add!

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It will come as no surprise to hear that I, a self-aggrandizing Leo monster, love birthdays. Dates! Anniversaries! MILESTONES. Any passage of time of note (particularly one that centers around me*~ and my accomplishments~*~*~) is one worth celebrating.

This proclivity is a fun and joyous one until your intestine explodes and yields a medical disaster so outsized you have no choice but to have the day it all went to shit burned into your brain forever. And then you lose your fucking job smack in the middle of it all, marking another date you simply cannot shake.

So while we’d begun prepping with such anticipation for the first annual Bowel Perf Disaster party (we’re still actually zeroing in on the date: 9/17/24 was the procedure that burst my bowels. It was seven days later, though, that I was hospitalized, operated on, and then never left. Thoughts on which it should be?? Lmk ASAP, I’m trying to plan a blowout!!), my six-month lay-off anniversary snuck right up on me this week.

If you’ve been reading this Substack for a bit, you’ll also know that I’m really, truly trying to work through what feels like a lot of anger about being laid-off, to the point that I’m spewing nonsense into the universe about it in some capacity every week. It unsurprisingly turns out I don’t love this particular commemoration.

…and yet! Despite days of stewing on the fact that six fucking months have passed??, I woke up perky Wednesday morning, the actual six-months-to-the-day-day that I got that fateful lil 15-minute HR Zoom invite. It turns out, I think, I have learned and grown in this time??

So! Breaking form a bit this week to share my biggest and cheesiest tips for emotionally managing funemployment. Again, I just told you pretty explicitly that I’m still a big mad mess, so, you know. Do with this all what you will.

(I will also quickly say, for subscribers brand-new and new-ish alike: I am done talking about this after this newsletter blasts out. I’m boring myself at this point, and I just want to talk to my old work friends about it, not the internet at large hoping it’ll tug at a few very specific corporate heartstrings that hurt me.) D-O-N-E.

my (potty-training) daughter, who does not listen to me telling her ‘WORK ISN’T EVERYTHING’ just ‘workin’ on something.’

1. You’re going to be so embarrassed. You have nothing to be embarrassed about.
   At some point after the immediate shock wears off, you’re going to feel shame. Or humiliation, really. I don’t know if this is typical, but my former employer structured it so that my entire team was called into a meeting as I received the news, so I couldn’t get ahold of anyone until after they’d been told…whatever they were told about my job in that meeting. I was also, like, very physically unwell at the time and was the only person I knew of in my whole department who was affected by the mass lay-off, so it all just kind of compounded into a related mess in my head: “Oh my god, everyone whose opinions I care about thinks I am the world’s biggest, sickest, weakest, most-underperforming idiot,” etc., etc.
   
   Jesus, is that untrue. If you are also sitting there thinking that, I ask you: How could that possibly be true? Look back at all your stellar performance reports when you feel this way (please tell me you grabbed those on the way out, babe). Check to see how many of your former colleagues are still watching your IG stories.
   
   Say it with me now: You’re not an embarrassing mess. You’re a mess because you were embarrassed.
   
   I’m obviously still grappling with this embarrassment. Normal, chill people don’t passive-aggressively lash out online about the same thing over and over and over and over. It helps that many of my friends (both media and otherwise) have told me repeatedly they feel angry and mortified about how they got laid off for months after the fact, or years, or more. And I can tell you with confidence I, at this six-month mark, am starting to feel less of it. I want to do bigger things! I want to land better! I know I will……….one day. And when I do? That anger’ll get wiped clean and replaced with a yummy smugness I so look forward to.
   
   

2. Your identity is more attached to a job than it should be. Oop!
   I know most of you are so far past the “work ≠ life, life ≠ work” thing (and maybe always have been!), but (1) I have a contingency of people who grew up in Cool Media Jobs with me following this blog who I suspect struggle with this too and (2) I thought I was doing better with this than I clearly was, so…I’m bringing it up now.
   
   When I first broached this phenomenon with Dartmouth’s Dr. Jessica K. Salwen-Deremer in an “oh god, who am I now?” issue back in April, she told me point-blank: “Just because more of you needs to be allocated to wellness at the moment, you're still a human.” I think the same stands to reason with your job, no? Just because less of you is attached to an employer, you’re still a human. “You have a curious brain and intellectual curiosity that needs to be satiated,” she said then, and…it’s unlikely that was happening through work anyway.
   
   So! The job is not who you are. It can give you weirdly useful niche skills. It might bring you some incredible relationships. It may also inform how you decide you want to try to spend a lot of your time, but…you are not the job. Do not let the abrupt change in schedule, life-life balance, income, or time expenditure convince you otherwise. You’re the person who now can monetize those hyper-specific skills and have a blast with your now-real-friends doing something bonkers in your spare time. But you are not the job.
   
   

3. People will immediately tell you this is a blessing in disguise. People are famously stupid.
   The mind reels at the idea of looking a freshly laid-off person in the face and telling them “one day, you’ll be so happy this happened.” REELS. You deserve more than just a minute of anger, sadness, and other swirly, existential thoughts that come on the heels of losing your livelihood. You deserve that without the required compulsion of gratefulness creeping up behind you all Ghostface-y.
   
   I got into this a bit with Oak Park Behavioral Medicine’s Dr. Tiffany Taft for my newsletter on feeling stuck while others move forward: “If people are trying to push you faster than you're ready to go,” she told me then, “it becomes more about their hurt [than yours]. They were upset by what happened, too, and they don't want to think about it.” Avoidance (and/or forcibly pushing forward) is one of the hallmarks of trauma, she continued, recommending you focus on your own path versus trying to get others to understand why you need time right now before you are basking in blessings.
   
   It may be true that, sure, yes, one day, you may start to think “god, I needed that time to heal, and, like, become half-a-human again,” but you deserve to come to that conclusion yourself, and not because someone guilted you into thinking you had to feel that way.
   
   …Or you may just stay mad. And honestly? I fucking love that for you. Let’s chat about it! And just think of how fun the Inaugural Bitter-As-All-Fuck-Bitches Convened party will be next summer!!

In other news, I got a mic. It works! I used it tell you all about the corned beef and other deli-style miscellanea I took down in my car this week. The corned beef in question (sublime! Razor-thinly shaved! Faaaaaatty!) came from Pastrami House Delicatessen in Morristown, NJ. The mic is a Røde thing. I don’t know. I’m sure it’s great.

Next week will feature more psychiatrist input, specific to the topic of small, unexpected PTSD triggers and how that all plays a part in ongoing recovery. Are you liking this “one week serious, one week less so”-kinda thing? I think I am? (I will begin paywall-ing the newsletters with subject matter experts as of next week, as a heads up.)

See you soon, you delicious sickos.

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Art by Amanda Suarez