I’ve never dealt with rejection well. Do you know that kid who would cry over spilled milk? Well, it was a bottle of water in my case, and it was only because my 3rd-grade teacher scolded me when I accidentally knocked it over. Still, I continued on this tearful trail, well past the point in which it was deemed cute.
So I guess you could say I reacted stronger than most when I was dealt with two major blows exactly one week apart from one another: Losing my coveted job as an editor of a magazine and losing the boyfriend who I thought was “the one.”
As an overachieving, recent Ivy League grad, it felt like the end of the world to get laid off at the ripe old age of twenty-five. Though some of my friends would eventually join my ranks in the months to come, at the time, I was the only person I knew who had experienced a layoff.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Throughout my life, I had always been labeled as one of the “smart ones.” Maybe I didn’t have mile-long legs or a 24-inch waist, but I had come to accept that my brains would take me further.
Raised in the era of Project Self Esteem, I had assumed that my career would be an endless ladder, ripe with fulfillment and recognition. Sure, I expected late nights at the office and cantankerous bosses, but never did I anticipate losing a job.
The moment when my boss had abruptly called me into his office– his eyes focused on his mahogany bookshelf — was etched firmly into my head. My boyfriend didn’t get my fixation. “Just go on unemployment,” he said matter-of-factly as if that solved everything. And it should have. After all, I had two compassionate, supportive parents, who would do everything in their power to make sure I had a roof over my head. I didn’t have to worry about raising kids or even a goldfish. All I had to do was worry about my own state of being.
Yet I couldn’t see myself as lucky, no matter how hard I tried to recite Oprah’s affirmations or count my blessings before bedtime. I was consumed by my layoff. Maybe I hadn’t been “fired” per se, but I felt like an utter failure.
A few days after my layoff, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my boyfriend, and I cried between flashes of Rothko and Caravaggio. We ran into an acquaintance of mine who was a young hotshot at a magazine that competed with mine. So envious was I of him that I could barely look him in the eye. When he asked me how my job was going, I murmured something about the “usual,” and then quickly excused myself to the nearest restroom. I proceeded to cry some more.
When my boyfriend and I left the museum, I took a deep breath and decided to show him the fun, carefree girl whom he had fallen in love with. I dared him to roll down a Central Park hill, and together we laughed ourselves silly. I felt an urge to cling to him, more so than I ever had. My smart, compassionate, relatively handsome boyfriend was proof that my twenty-five years of life had not been a total waste. I toyed with the idea of moving to Chicago, where he was attending graduate school so that we could finally be in the same city together. After all, I no longer had anything holding me back in the city.
But then it happened. Exactly one week after my layoff, he gave me a call and announced that he no longer wanted to be with me. “You are inconsolable,” he declared, diagnosing me the way an ophthalmologist might report that a patient has astigmatism. He explained that I had reacted so intensely to my layoff that he didn’t even want to know how I would handle all of the disappointments that any couple is bound to encounter throughout life together (which in his mind seemed to correlate with a miscarriage, perhaps because his mother was an OB/GYN). Plus, he added, “All you care about and talk about is your layoff. You never even ask about me anymore.” It was quite simple, really, or so his words implied: I was not girlfriend material, for him at least.
My friends couldn’t believe the timing of the situation. “How dare he,” they said, rattling off the curse words they would throw at him should they ever run into him at Whole Foods. Yet I wasn’t angry. He was right. I had become so consumed by the layoff that I had allowed it to define me, losing sight of the other aspects that compromised my life. As a result, I lost the person whom I had associated most with my future. Suddenly, my layoff felt a lot less important.
I began to hold him on a pedestal, idolizing the relationship we had once had, despite my friends’ attempts to bring him down. “But he laughs at the jokes on HGTV!” said my roommate. “He almost voted for Trump!” said a college friend. It didn’t matter anymore. I missed him and all of the annoying, dorky tics of his that had always made me cringe. Sometimes, when I would get home after a day of running errands, I would envision a bouquet of roses propped up on my doorstep, with an apology letter proclaiming how he had made the biggest mistake of his life.
But I wasn’t in a Kate Hudson movie — and clearly, I was no Kate Hudson. Days and then weeks and then months went by without so much as a single phone call. I decided to block him on Google Chat so I wouldn’t have to see his name on my buddy list. But then each time I signed online, I worried — what if he was trying to reach out to me but couldn’t? I then unblocked him.
I couldn’t fathom how someone could go from planning a future with me to not even sending me an obligatory “Happy Birthday” text. Yet his utter silence seemed to only confirm just how badly I had messed up — and how unlovable I truly was.
Would I have gotten dumped had I not gotten laid off? At first, I insisted on finding a correlation between the two events. But then I realized there was bound to have been some other incident that would have jeopardized my sense of self and caused me to tumble into despair again. Without a doubt, he would have fled just the same.
I had faith that I would eventually meet other men, but I feared as soon as they saw this ugly side of me, they would want nothing to do with me. So I tried my best to turn my diagnosis upside down. Instead of lingering in my misery, I kept myself busy. I read the New Yorker cover to cover and did my 30 minutes of cardio religiously. I filled my evenings with good friends and laughter and cheap 2-buck-chuck. I clumped together my every last penny and planned a trip to Thailand with two girlfriends from high school. I picked up a few freelance writing gigs here and there, and, in time, even found a part-time job as an editorial assistant at a trade magazine. The pay was less than what I had earned during my babysitting days in high school, but, still, it gave me a reason to get up in the morning and change out of my college sweatshirt.
And then something happened. I got used to this new version of my life. In fact, I was having fun. I was now a fuller, richer version of myself, ex-boyfriend be damned. If he couldn’t accept me for all that I was, then who the hell cared? He didn’t love me anymore and that was okay. I finally had learned to accept and love myself, flaws and all — and that was all that mattered.
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Previously Published on Medium
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