A direct result of my first firing is that I moved to the other side of the world. This is quite a mind blast, if I think about it rationally, which I confess I don’t very often.
The thing is, I find it difficult to get to grips with the fact that I gave up a home in which I could, and often did, sit in and think, “I love this place and everything in it,” from the fabrics I’d chose for the curtains that I’d made, to the paint colors I’d put on the walls because they made me feel good, to the original art I’d collected, each piece with a story and most of which make me laugh, or at least smile, and so on and so forth. I could carry on for several pages.
I didn’t like that my apartment was on the first floor and I didn’t have a view. This was the single shortcoming.
And I didn’t like that I couldn’t find another project in South Africa that both grabbed me and wanted me. (Hey, am I talking about finding a job or finding a relationship? Or do they both work the same way?)
There were reasons beyond the firing, but it was the linchpin that got me on an Air France plane to Paris, from where I connected to London; then on to Huston, could it have been, for customs? — and then San Francisco. I had a one-year return ticket — and no idea I would not use it to return.
But getting back to that first layoff, from the nonprofit.
There were some powerful learnings that live with me still.
For example, take the young woman I’ll call Glenda.
I don’t know, now that I think about it, what her background was in terms of where she’d worked before. I can tell you she was short, and chubby in a Rubenesque sort of way, and she was married to a dorky newspaper editor, and she had a couple of kids.
And when we were laid off, I realized that she was not just losing her job. She was losing her identity.
Her job was who she was. Nothing else in her life, I saw as her self-confident bossy-boots persona dropped away, had significance, if she could not lay claim to her job.
In her case, desperation fueled her. Her need for a calling card (there was no financial need) propelled her into action and she was instrumental in scrambling together a new little org that limped along, for a while, from the dregs of the old.
I thought of Glenda last week.
I was doing a Saturday social media workshop in the journalism department at the University of California, Berkeley. I was talking to a woman whose dad had worked for 35 years — or maybe 40 — at the San Francisco Chronicle.
And then he retired.
Not out of choice, but because he’d reached retirement age.
She told us how, after leaving, all her dad had wanted to do was to go back to work. At the Chronicle.
And she told us how, not having this option, he was dead within two years.
Now, she said, she was worried about her mother, who was due to retire.
She said she was trying to get her mother to prepare for retirement with words like, “Imagine, you’ll be able to relax and do nothing.”
I had to bite my tongue when I heard that one. (She wasn’t asking for opinions or ideas.)
Her story woke me up to the fact that retirement can be the equivalent of a layoff.
If you are you job (OK — now you get the idea behind the title of this blog), then losing your job is like, well, losing yourself.
