New Year! Sans job
It's been a bit since I've posted here but the last six months or so have been wildly busy and a bit of a tipping point in my life. This past week, I got laid off finally after wondering for basically my entire career thus far when it would happen.
Even when working at S, the discussion was always a question around "when" rather than the safer "if." Clearly that is quite a depressing situation to be learning and growing in and yet I did it for 6 years. Seeing others at my company go through major emotional turmoil when layoffs happened made it clear how the system worked and the kind of worker I was expected to be.
Being acculturated in this constant state of low-level anxiety and not knowing anything else clearly has made it easier for me to cope than my coworkers who have had their jobs for 20+ years. I was never one to make friends at work and even when I had in Chicago, it did not feel so gut-wrenching to have to leave them. To be clear though, now that I've been laid off, it's not exactly been easy. This past week especially. Waking up and feeling a mixture of guilt, a new type of anxiety, and even some feelings adjacent to depression have made it clear this is not something I'll be able to gloss over.
My job was, in some sense, my dream job. The day-to-day work of data analytics, Excel sheets, PowerBI reports, and Python code were unentertaining to say the least. There were days I felt truly uninspired and bored - like my brain was wasting away in my head. That type of work was not work I wanted to be doing as often as I had been asked to do it. The dream part came in the access to information I had and the relation the job had to my personal interest in telecom. It also came in the form of knowing that most of my friends and family relied daily on the network that I was helping to improve. Nevermind I also enjoyed working directly with customers at certain points and successfully troubleshoot issues that helped a lot of people. The pay and benefits were certainly good too though probably lower than some of my peers in software.
Anyway, now I feel like I'm back to square one. Not totally aimless but knocked down a peg. My family and coworkers have all been telling me to "start your own business" but I think I'm still in shock and not even sure if I have an idea to put behind that just yet. Still less than a week into being unemployed, maybe I shouldn't expect that of myself right now. There's other things I'd like to do in the meantime and I'll still be getting paid for a while.