Six weeks ago, we left for our family vacation, one of the best we’ve ever had.
On the Monday I returned to work, I got fired.
"I can think of a thousand better ways to start the week," I said through the swirling haze forming in my head.
"Well, it was a toss-up between before your vacation or after your vacation," he said. Thanks, buddy.
In so many ways, getting fired sucks. My self-image took a hit; we lost our (very good) health insurance; future employers want to know why you left your last job. "Can we contact your old boss?" they ask, and I don’t know how to answer them; he wasn’t the one who fired me.
In so many other ways, getting fired was one of the best things that happened to me in a long time. I love getting enough sleep every single night; I exercise most days now; I’m even thinking about writing again (see this? I can tell you why nothing has been written since that day, and it has everything to do with a job I mostly liked yet took a lot of my mental energy).
My unemployment got approved today, thereby giving me some freedom to wait for the right job, and also to write. I have tried very hard in the last few weeks to give myself space, space to obsess, space to rest, space to stretch. In the last week I’ve begun to develop a routine that will serve me during this transition and into that future job, which in fact we need. I had a brief period of fantasy about working part-time, but health insurance is a priority, and we like eating, so that got swatted down pretty quickly.
But the writing will begin again. Not the screenwriting yet; I need something less ambitious and more manageable. If necessary, I intend to write thousands of words of utter crap. However, not all of it will be crap. Some of it I will like, a lot, and will eventually see the light of day.
And in two years, much in my life has changed. Those writing projects? Much of them still stands, but what and how I think about life has undergone a radical change. So may they.
Posted by on Friday, August 29, 2008 at 11:13 PM
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