Asynchronous Orbit

Firstly--and this is important--I would like to enter it into the record that I have never once used the portmanteau "funemployment," nor will I ever. You would be right (and a little bit of an asshole) to point out that I just did use it, right there, in the previous sentence, but invoking a thing is not the same as employing a thing. Besides, everyone knows you have to say a thing a minimum of three times in order to make it actually manifest. You can also cheat by having two other people say a thing at the same time. That's how we ended up with a second Beetlejuice movie. I leave the moral implications of that for you to decide.

About six weeks in now, I still struggle to talk about or understand myself in conversation with other people while I'm in my unusual paid unemployment phase. It's not a new source of angst or confusion (the previous sentence has a whole hyperlink to an earlier post about this, so, you know, obviously...), but I've recently had cause to interact in more meaningful ways with some of my former colleagues, those who chose to stick it out as my old job exists in a limbo state that mirrors my own, between things as it figures itself out ahead of moving 3,000 miles away. The main difference of course is my existential-furniture-rearrangement phase only really affects my cat and (when she wanders into the blast zone) my non-live-in partner. It's a way more expensive proposition when an institution has the same kind of extended period of unmoderated self-doubt. Destabilization means a lot more when you own several occupied buildings. And even more when the people inside those buildings depend on you for health care.

I remain technically employed at my old job as my elongated severance status lingers, so there have been occasions where, for administrative reasons, I've had to log in to my old email and Teams accounts. On the one hand, of course it's never not going to be a relief to zip past the backlog of bolded UNREAD items without any sense of obligation. On the other hand, it's really odd to say this about things with subject lines like "The annual government financial ethics training you were assigned is now 30 days overdue," but it does make you feel a little like you're revisiting your old house some weeks after your own funeral. I don't think you'd really realize you were a ghost until you saw everything most familiar to you moving along without you. Although if you're a ghost and you're out there visiting your old job, I'm not sure you're really making the most of it. Whatever "unfinished business" you have to complete before you're released into the bliss of the afterlife or whatever, unchained from the mortal plane, I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with making the weekly Tuesday staff meetings. Or if it did, I'm so, so sorry.

What I get asked specifically by former colleagues is if I'm out there looking for a new job or if I'm just on a long vacation. A month-plus in I can say: really kind of neither. Some of that is circumstance as I've had to schedule some medical stuff and get through some appointments. But that's settled now; I've got a (very minor) procedure definitively on the books for early June. So my time and energy is "free" finally but for some reason the last thing I want to do with my former-ish colleauges--or with anyone really--is betray in any way that I'm actually having a great time. Not as in I'm hiding it, but more because if there's a way to do that in this circumstance, I haven't cracked it.

This is for two reasons: 1) it's the American shame thing of not really being able to relax or define yourself except by the value you generate as a working person. I struggled with it mightily while I was a stay at home parent. It's also, I think, the same thing that makes billionairs incapable of just fucking going away. It's OK, you did it, you won, go do some indoor hobbies, preferably ones that don't include being governor of my state. And 2) this isn't really that fun. A lot of it has to do with things related to Point 1 (see immediately above. Did you forget already, my god...), but it's also not just cultural. I really do have to sort of Figure Out The Rest Of My Life on a timer. I also have to learn to flatten out the spikes of anger when I internally respond that "I had figured out the rest of my stupid life with a civil service job, but that was destroyed by a totally different billionaire fucking hobbyist, a couple of them actually..." Exciting as it is to break new emotional ground exploring the ways in which rage and anxiety complement and exacerbate one another, I am going to have mortgage payments all the way through the end of the year and beyond, and I currently do not have a source of income for any of them past September.

It's a difficult thing to complain about, but look, I just spent another six paragraphs trying. I'm sure there are ways I could find to make more of this experience, turn it into an opportunity for growth or personal exploration. But the thing they don't tell you about growth or personal exploration: that shit happens anyway. I'm sure this will have been a fecund and enlightening phase of being, but only in retrospect. I also, for example, grew and explored personally when I got divorced, and though I know the things and people in my life are better for it having happened, that shit sucked ass. And that experience also taught me that the "growth" and "personal exploration" positive outcomes are all achieved with a tremendous amount of work (higher or lower relative to the trauma involved) and some definitive, practiced choices about contextualization. In other words, you have to decide that it was worth it. For me, handling this, that'll come later. Hopefully before the first mortgage payment in October is due.