The first thing I did, after the godawful call this morning with my college’s provost and an administrator from human resources, was make a prosciutto and butter sandwich. And then I told my wife that I’d been fired. And then I told my children.
Being fired wasn’t a complete shock to me, as I knew that throughout higher education, and especially here in New York City, serious financial challenges would result from the corona-virus. But still, the news, delivered fast and formally, will forever rank among the most traumatic moments of my life. Right behind the realization that my city was under attack from hijacked airplanes; and the respective times when I learned that my mother and my oldest friend were sick with the kind of sick from which people don’t recover.
I’ll recover. I guess. I hope. I dunno. That’s the hard part. I’ve been unemployed for all of a few hours and it feels like I may never be the same. OK! That’s dramatic, but work with me people! Can’t you see I’m spinning here?
Ironically, unbeknownst of my looming fate, I was reading an op-ed in The Times this morning about the legions of firings happening across America. Apparently, the trauma caused by being fired has been compared to that of losing a loved one. Awesome.
Clearly there’s a curve to the comparison of losing a job to losing a person, but I can imagine the similarities. Ya know, the phases of grief and the adaptation to the new normal (whatever that is). For me, the worst part of loss involved the crushing and frequent reminders that the loved one was no longer here; I can only hope this trauma isn’t so profound with the loss of a job.
Will I not know joy until this is somehow over? And when will this exactly be over? Oy.
Something that’s scaring the crap out of me, which is surely distinct to being fired, is how profoundly personal it feels. I imagine I’m not the only one at my college who lost their job today, and, of course, I’m not alone in this experience overall, but it feels like I am.
I lost my job. My income. My status. My security. My identity. Making it all the worse is that I will miss my colleagues, and I will especially miss my students. I love teaching, but I’m not a teacher anymore. That hurts most of all.
The mind-fuck of being fired adds humiliation and hopelessness to the existing agonies that define these hellish times in which we live. We are all suffering, big time, though like in Dante’s Inferno, there are different levels, and I know now there is one level, perhaps just above the lonely, especially reserved in the fiery depths for those who have been fired.
A small solace in all of this is that in one of my novels the protagonist was fired, and I can say now that – having never experienced such at that point – I did a masterful job of depicting the impact. I’ve got that going for me…Still, I’m going to need a lot more prosciutto and butter. Ugh.
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