Читать книгу Zen Bender - Stephanie Krikorian - Страница 11
Оглавлениеsurvival
In mid-September 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and things were looking bleak across the country. That was putting it mildly. We were staring into a global economic abyss. At the time, I was producing a television show for BusinessWeek magazine called BusinessWeekTV. It was a financial news show produced on the forty-ninth floor of the McGraw-Hill building, so we were keenly aware of what was happening, economically speaking.
Right around that time, my friend and colleague Wendy and I were running out to grab lunch. As we waited for the elevator, we ran into Jack, the guy who did the budgets. Jack being a usually chatty and friendly person, we asked how he was, and he explained that he was frazzled because it was budget time and he was working long days.
Friendly and amusing as always, Wendy said to him, “Make sure you leave enough for us in TV.”
If there was an Academy Award for Best Worst Poker Face, Jack would have won it. He froze. His smile vanished and his face went white. Then he practically dove headfirst into the elevator without saying a word.
Wendy and I looked at each other after he left and noisily burst out laughing. “Well, that was awkward,” she said. We thought perhaps there would be some belt-tightening—no more holiday dinners at Bobby Van’s. Maybe due to lack of imagination, or over-confidence, or just plain naiveté, we had no idea what we were in for.
We should have known better.
Still, I didn’t think too much of Jack in the elevator. Later, I was meeting some friends for dinner at Otto off Fifth Avenue, and I had some time to kill. As usual, I was ultra-early, so I sat on a bench and stared at the fountain in that little triangle park where Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue intersect.
I had a bad feeling that I couldn’t shake, so I called the anchor of our show as I sat there soaking in the last licks of September sunshine.
“Do you think we will lose our jobs?”
She insisted we had nothing to worry about because we were making money for the company. Still, deep in my gut, I felt a shift on the horizon.
And, of course, there was the Jack incident, this probably marked the last time for a long time that I would trust my gut.
When in Doubt, Buy a Bad-Ass Handbag
Anticipating that I might never again earn a proper living, I did what everyone should never do when facing unemployment and financial collapse. I got up from my seat in that park and walked, with urgency, to Marc by Marc Jacobs and bought a show-stopping five-hundred-dollar purple leather bag.
It was a floppy, large, chunky-hardware, hobo-type bag with lots of outside pockets (a subway rider’s dream). For years, I’d been contemplating what life would be like if I owned that bag or one like it, but up until then I’d never spent five hundred dollars on any single clothing item or accessory. It was an insane purchase, but I felt strongly it was the last expensive purse I’d ever be able to afford. I joked later that night with my friends that if I did get laid off, I would live in the handbag.
I had been right to worry.
A week later, I was late to work. Very late, for some reason I can’t remember. At ten fifteen, I got a call from my boss asking where I was. I said I was on my way in a cab. He’d never called before.
“Hurry up and get here,” he said. “We’re all assembled in the conference room.”
“Are we being laid off?” I asked. Somehow I knew.
“I can’t say,” he said.
“So, yes,” I said.
I was late for my layoff.
Everyone had been sitting in the conference room since nine, waiting to get axed, when I rolled in wearing ripped jeans and black suede boots suitable for farming. They had filed out eventually, and when I finally arrived everyone filed back in. And with a prepared statement and limited information from non-human human resources types, it was over.
The magazine would live. The TV show and my career would die.
I was gutted. In slow motion, everybody on the team walked to their desks and made a phone call. I didn’t call anybody right away. I just sat there and stared off into space, feeling humiliated. I’d never experienced anything like this before, and I simply didn’t know what to do.
Later that day, on the subway ride home, I looked at all the people on the B train heading uptown and wondered if they knew I was a loser, who, in three months’ time, would be without a paycheck.
“This will be the best thing that ever happened to you.” I heard that a lot from well-meaning friends when, shell-shocked, I told them what had happened with my job.
I’ll say this as yogically and New-Age-ily as I can, but every single time someone said that to me after I was laid off, as a single-income homeowner facing a mortgage on a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, staring at the end of my thirties—and likely the end of my best days professionally, not to mention for my ovaries—I wanted to literally punch the living crap out of them.
And I’ve never hit anybody. Except my younger sister, Jennifer, but only once, and that was a long time ago.
Even now, after making it through the layoff, I don’t view my experience as “great” or “the best” in any way. To be very clear: Getting laid off was not at the time, nor is it viewed by me today as, the best thing that ever happened to me. Not even close.
Getting a coupon for a free bagel and cream cheese in a gift bag at a charity event was a better, more enjoyable life event. Losing my American Express card somewhere on 72nd Street, then replacing it, only to have the new card fall out of my pocket again two weeks later—basically sprinkling Manhattan with my line of credit but having nobody use either card—was a more thrilling life event than getting laid off.
In fact, rage was all I felt when that sentiment was recklessly tossed my way by well-meaning friends. To this day, I don’t view it as the best thing that ever happened to me, but the worst, maybe. And I concede that, if that’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, I’m an incredibly fortunate person.
Did I get through it? Yes. Over it? No. Not even close.
Only looking back do I see where that sentiment may have come from. They’d all been watching Oprah, too.
The Secret had permeated the collective mindset by that point. Many people were suddenly and breathlessly explaining to me that I could finally “do what I loved!” with my life. (I, by the way, loved working in television news.)
There they were, the first squeaks of self-help-esque optimism. Most everybody seemed gung-ho and on board with the Best Thing attitude. Keep in mind, I was a product of the ‘90s workforce. Work-life balance? What the fuck was that? You worked. Period. I am the daughter of parents who worked every day to provide for their children and the granddaughter of an Armenian immigrant named Mgerdich Krikorian, who walked to work to pour steel in the foundry for a dollar a day so he could send his four children to school. Doing what you loved? Liked, maybe.
Of course, this sentiment was coming from people with paychecks and spouses with paychecks and 401ks and health care—people who were all fine espousing the new-found New Age wisdom, but I don’t recall too many of them leaving their six-figure jobs to practice what they were preaching. There’s a chance that the concept of facing what I was facing seemed a dream to them. Perhaps they were seducing themselves to not have to decide to leave a job they didn’t like and chase a dream? Maybe. Maybe they really did see me as the lucky one.
Still, what New Age way of thinking could possibly suggest that an end to a career that I loved was the best thing? Or was I being too pessimistic in my frustration? Would my mortgage company in fact take a check for “doing what I loved,” or did that require actual money?
Something else that I found weird at that time that always stuck with me: Many people felt the need to point out that things could have been worse. We all knew that. Things can always be worse. It was true.
But it’s not exactly the thing you need or want to hear as you face your own personal end of days.
“At least you don’t have cancer.”
I didn’t. And for that I was grateful. But that didn’t mean my crisis was any easier on me.
One person said it was hard to feel sorry for me because I had so much going for me. Again, the cable company wasn’t taking checks for “stuff I have going for me.”
Plus, there was almost a hierarchy of pity surrounding a city of laid-off people. Many people talked about how badly they felt for “breadwinners”—a.k.a. men with families who had to feed their children and put them through private school. As a single and childless woman with a mortgage, just FYI, I was, and continue to be, the breadwinner in my home, too.
It was like an onslaught of weird advice that Lucy from Peanuts gave to Charlie Brown from her psychiatric booth, and at the time, I simply wasn’t in the mood for, or buying into, it.
Not quite yet anyway, though I was soon to be born again myself.
All the sentiment led to some layoff takeaway that probably goes against the grain of most self-help thinking: Nobody wants to hear the easy-to-offer hypothetical bright side when they are drenched in self-pity and drowning in uncertainty. I did not. I just wanted to soak in my own agony for a while, so I could feel it, and sort through my personal crisis, however great or small it was to someone else; I wanted to acknowledge the pain of it all before taking action to fix it.
Perhaps friends, or society, or whatever we are collectively, don’t want to deal with the discomfort of such a situation. But, looking back, avoiding the struggle that I was feeling wasn’t the answer. Not for me. And not now that I’ve gone through it.
My advice today? When a friend is having a hard time, let her cry it out. Acknowledge: This sucks. Feel it with her. Don’t skimp on agreeing. Tell her, “You have every right to be upset. Take a few days, eat potato chips for breakfast. Stay in your pajamas and watch back-to-back Law & Order repeats. (I have heard that that is a thing…from, uh, a friend.) Feel the sting. Don’t avoid it or look for the sunny side until you’re ready.”
Nobody in crisis needs to hear that it could be worse.
Nobody needs to hear that their anxiety isn’t worthy of a sob fest.
Irrational Panic
In the months that followed getting laid off, I went on thirty-one job interviews. It was a challenging time. It felt like musical chairs. There were jobs, then a chair was pulled away and there were fewer options out there.
People were rapidly getting laid off, dropping like flies. This led me to face the realization that returning to a position in television news, at a certain level on the ladder, was going to be even more of a challenge than I’d thought when the hammer first came down.
I remember a former colleague named Peggy called me the afternoon we’d all gotten the axe because she’d heard about the cutbacks. She connected me with people at her network, and within days, I went in for an interview. I was feeling optimistic. For like five minutes. After lots of initial enthusiasm, I didn’t hear anything back. Why? They had all gotten laid off, too. That didn’t happen just once. It was like dominos at that time, and I was struggling to get out in front of it.
I went for four interviews at a major cable network for a single job. It was a job that I had been qualified for a decade earlier, but still, it was a job and, as my mother might have said, beggars can’t be choosers. It was a morning-show gig and I had done my homework. By the time the fourth and final job interview came around (which meant four different outfits, a stressor for me, by the way), I had spent the week watching the show and charting the segments they had aired. I recorded the competition each day and did the same there, then I compared everything and made notes on each network’s choices and what I might have done differently had I been producing.
I felt ready to take on that final interview, prepared, fully versed on the news of the week, the anchors of the show, and more.
When, halfway through the interview, one of the anchors asked me if I had watched that day, and what I might have done differently had I been producing, I was immediately thrilled because I had watched and I had several suggestions. Then I panicked. I couldn’t remember a single thing. It had not crossed my mind to bring my pages of notes into the meeting.
My mind was suddenly empty.
Nerves frayed from the trauma of studying, finding new things to wear, and making sure I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, I blanked.
Full. On. Blanked.
And suddenly so frantic was I that recovery was 100 percent impossible.
“I did watch,” I said to the room full of people awkwardly waiting to hear, “but I can’t remember anything right now.”
It was all the more tragic because it sounded like every unemployed producer on the planet had applied for that job, and as I understood it, it was down to the final two, me being one. I stumbled through the rest of my interview, mortified and humiliated, and after I left, I didn’t make it out the door of that building before bursting into tears.
I was buckling under the pressure of the search.
But the Universe must have had plans for me. What was it telling me? That was very unclear.
Once it became painfully obvious that a real job wasn’t going to happen fast, and once I learned what severance-plus-unemployment-plus-subsidies-from-my-mom were going to look like and how grim the job market was, I made a budget and instituted my own austerity program.
Molton Brown soap was sadly the first indulgence to go. Ivory bar soap would do just fine. All subscriptions to magazines and newspapers went away too—canceled immediately. Instead, the nail salon downstairs in my building served as a de facto library, and I would go and sit there to find out which stars were, in fact, just like us. I snatched my neighbors’ discarded newspapers, and I curated a list of user logins from friends for major newspapers online and premium TV channels. Pride went out the door.
I initiated a one-pump rule for all remaining soap-like products—shampoo, conditioner, face wash, and moisturizer. No more mindlessly pumping a handful of liquid; I was on a budget. Every once in a while, when I was feeling blue or neglected, I’d hesitantly treat myself to a second pump. I stopped taking cabs. I stopped taking classes.
I sold some stuff, including a pole-dancing pole I had installed in the second bedroom. I had jumped on the popular pole-dancing-class bandwagon (to feel empowered, I was told). Class was super fun and physically challenging, but while most people could climb to the top of the pole in class, I found I could not. I would slide down and not be able to do the flip at the top—or all the good moves that came with hoisting oneself to the ceiling.
I didn’t feel empowered, I felt pissed-off. So, I bought a pole and had it installed in my apartment so I could practice climbing at home. Competitive much? (I never made it to the top. Not once.)
So, along with fancy soap, I said goodbye to the pole and the pricey classes that went with it.
Shopping was no longer an activity for me either, unless it was mission-critical. I canceled my gym membership and the trainer, too. For the first time in my life, I priced out items like toilet paper and paper towels, and almost daily did a cash tally, measuring out just how far I could stretch things if the worst happened and I found no work.
In hindsight, I perhaps unnecessarily catastrophized the situation. And to this day, I’m a catastrophizer, thanks to the worry of not having a regular paycheck.
I braced for the worst.
My severance ran out on March 27, 2009, and that was a more brutal day than the layoff itself. That’s when hope died and panic set in.
When I went on unemployment, as per some official New York State policy, I had to go downtown to a state-run resume seminar. I won’t lie: I was heading in there with serious attitude. I couldn’t believe I had to endure the humiliation of learning to make a resume. Uh, I got this. I don’t need a seminar. I wanted to spend the time looking for jobs. But, to my surprise, my irkedness paled in comparison to the rest of the crowd. My class was filled with Wall Street guys whose body language (arms crossed, no pen in hand, slouched down in their seat) made clear they were more pissed-off than I was to be there. They were wearing super fancy watches, beautifully tailored untucked striped shirts, and expensive sunglasses propped on top of their heads. And they weren’t happy. I realized then that, while my job loss sucked bad, they had further to fall than I did, financially speaking. It’s a long drop from a healthy seven figures to unemployment. I wondered what their austerity budgets looked like. I was giving up expensive hand soap. They were giving up second and third homes. Still, like the entire process, it was emotionally draining and completely demoralizing.
The professional trauma hit me hard. In fact, for many years, it was the driving force behind many of my life decisions. But, instead of assessing the circumstances around me that may have contributed, I looked inward: Here’s what’s wrong with you, and that is why you are here.
It took a decade to realize that landing thirty-one interviews in an employment crisis was an impressive feat. But, at the time, I didn’t know that. It didn’t feel impressive.
It felt desperate.
