Tools for Job Loss
Ten things I learned the hard way.
The Hard Prune delivers practical tools for dystopian times to your inbox most Fridays.
This week I’m drawing on my personal experience to share tools for those facing the acute pain of job loss — whether potential or imminent or in progress. This might be your own job, or it might be the job of someone close to you. I’m sharing things I learned the hard way through losing not just my job, but my career — my entire professional identity and most of my personal one too.
This is not something I talk about very much.
I left my academic career near the end of 2019. You could say it was my choice, as I wasn’t fired, but the reality is that staying wasn’t a viable option. I don’t like to get into details, but basically: I was dealing with a situation that was as ugly as it gets, and the system meant to fix it was too deeply corrupt to do anything but enable and abet. When I spoke up and resisted, I was seen as the problem. I learned firsthand what it is to experience the so-called ‘justice’ of a kangaroo court: the painful, Orwellian disorientation of institutional gaslighting. I fought until I couldn’t anymore.
When I walked away from the career I’d spent most of my adult life building at great cost — a decision many in my life did not understand — I resolved it would be the best thing that ever happened to me.
This was an objectively crazy thing to resolve. I’d just lost my income a year after buying a house I could barely afford. My kids were one and four. I was living on a visa in a foreign country. The only people I knew were people I knew through the work I no longer did. I had no idea what I’d do next. Defaulting on the mortgage was a very real possibility. And then, insult to injury, Covid arrived six months later.
I wrote my way through this time – during the trauma and into its long aftermath, a period which included training as a professional gardener. I shaped my words into a full-length manuscript. Slowly, I found my way (or my way found me) into a multi-hyphenate life of writing, coaching, facilitating, gardening and (because I wanted a 3-dimensional, indoor creative practice too), weaving. I acquired an agent and a deal to publish a different book – not the memoir of losing my job and learning to garden, but a project that came out of that time of reconciling identities, when my gardener-self met my historian-self and they started a conversation.
The memoir is still unpublished, and I think I may prefer it that way, but there is a piece I want to share with you here: an appendix I added to the end, once I had enough perspective to understand what had happened during those painful months and how I had gotten through.
This appendix is a list of ten things I learned about unplanned career change. I wrote it because people had started asking for my thoughts on getting to the other side. They saw that I had survived, that I was even thriving.
I realise I run the risk of appearing tone-deaf by sharing this list. It could that be you or someone you love find yourself in a situation so different from mine that nothing here is of any use. But if there is even one little thing that proves helpful, please forgive me the rest and take that one useful bit and run with it!
When you are about to lose your job and need to figure out what’s next:
You can trust your gut. Sometimes your body figures things out before your brain does.
Discouragement is part of the process.
Reach out to the people who know you best – family, old friends, the ones who knew the you before this current iteration. Tell them what you are thinking. See what they say. (For me, invariably, it was Finally!)
Like any career advice book says, talk to people in lots of different fields. You can call it networking or informational interviewing; I call it making new friends who have interesting jobs. One of the most useful outcomes of this can be seeing how they react to you, what that see in you that you may not notice, may take for granted. This can be very illuminating.
Travel, if you can, even just to a neighbouring state or town. Get some perspective.
A little financial pressure can be a good thing. A lot can really light a fire under your ass.
If there is anger pushing you out of your current situation, thank it for the opportunity.
The seven stages of grief can be a helpful construct, especially the understanding that your emotional progress through this transition will not be linear.
Find support. You’ll know what you need and can afford.
The more people you tell what you’re up to, the more people you’ll have cheering you on. But choose wisely; people with lives too similar to yours will project their fears onto you. You need to be prepared to cut some people out for a while. I know you can’t cut out your partner. Balance empathy with resolve.
Postcard from my garden
