You are not your job

If you enjoy watching a man talk to the voices inside of his head, you're at the right place.

I got laid off yesterday. Actually, today. I was informed that I was being laid off yesterday.

This is the second time I’ve lost a job, the first one being during the pandemic in 2020. That doesn’t make it any easier, but it does make it slightly more believable when I tell myself that it’ll be okay.

That being said, since the moment I was told the news, it has felt a little bit like there are two distinct voices battling inside my head. One is confident and proud. The other is scared and ashamed. It’s a bit like having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.

I can sit here and tell you that I was great at my job, and I was. I was even told as much by the person who made the decision to let me go, as well as every (now former?) coworker that I talked with after they heard the news.

And that’s enough for the angel, but the devil never shuts up…

How will we continue to pay the mortgage? Will we lose the house?

It was okay last time. It will be okay this time. We know how the systems work. We know what our backup plans are, as loathsome as they may be.

Between a severance package and unemployment, I’ve got some time to figure out what comes next.

You know Christmas is less than three weeks away…

That’s fine! All of the presents are already purchased and sitting hidden in the back of a closet.

Will it feel a bit Willy Loman-esque to be unemployed on Christmas? Especially now that my kid is old enough to know the difference between a dad who has to work during her school break and one who doesn’t?

Yes, but it is what it is. I can’t change when this decision was made, even if the proximity to a major holiday was the first thing that my enraged mother noted when I gave her the news.

Also, your 40th birthday is about seven weeks away.

I KNOW. The plans for this birthday were supposed to be drinking my way across Scotland and then Belgium with my uncle, but those plans were dashed due to his wife’s recent heart transplant anyway. We’ll hopefully pick them up sometime in the future.

The truth is that I didn’t really have plans for my 40th. Maybe golf with the guys. Maybe a long bike ride on a path I have never been on. There was talk about visiting Catalina for the first time. And those things are still entirely possible on a tighter budget. It’ll be fine.

Why aren’t you more upset about this?

Because I had made my peace with it weeks before it happened, I knew my future wasn’t in sports media anymore. I made a decision to go back to school in hopes of becoming a therapist. I’d like to help people with their trauma, their anxieties, their loneliness and addictions. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and something that I’ve always been too afraid to pursue.

School starts in January for me. That’s been the case for a while. The journey from here to my dreams is probably five years or more. I was hoping to hold onto this job while I did the school thing at night, now it’ll be a different job that pays the bills while I try to be the student that I should’ve been in my teens and 20s.

Ah, shit. You told them you were doing this, didn’t you?

Yup. And maybe that was a mistake. Maybe telling them that I was pursuing a different career was the final straw that made the decision for them, stamping myself as “not a long-term manager” or the dreaded “not invested enough”.

But, at the end of the day, I try very hard to adhere to this simple phrase:

You are not your job.

When someone asks how I am, I try very hard to make my job one of the very last things that I talk about.

There are journeys and there are jobs. I just lost a job, right at the moment that I’m about to start a journey. That’s not a one-for-one tradeoff, but it’s headed in the right direction.

But, at one point, this was your journey and your career and now you’re giving up on it?

I’m not giving up! Just the opposite. I’m going to use the time between this job and the next one to do what I did the last time I found myself in this situation.

I’m going to write again. A LOT. Maybe every day! We’ll see. What the scope of that writing will be is a bit unknown at the moment, but that’s fine. Maybe this turns back into a daily Padres blog, maybe it’s something else. People will read if they want to.

Oh, and I’m going to host shows again. Producing podcasts and YouTube shows over the past few years has been a blast, honestly. I’ve made some great friends and digitally met some of my actual heroes. But when I tell you that I have missed getting on the microphone and being in front of the camera…..I mean it.

I can not wait to get back to entertaining whoever is entertained by me. And maybe, if there’s enough of those people out there, that becomes what pays the bills while I learn how to be the person that people call on when their brain is on fire and they need help.

Wish me luck. Or reach out, if you know of a job opportunity. I have a few projects that I’m already in the process of setting up, which makes this timing more fortuitous than it would’ve otherwise been, but I promise I am not too busy for a chat.