Your Presence Is No Longer Required

"You're Fired." . . . Is there anything in our education that ever prepares us for those two words? Surely not anything in our basic educational template can ever prepare you to face the tidal wave of emotions & physical reactions that those two words bring on. Well, perhaps High School. Then only if you had a particularly sadistic gym teacher, or perhaps if you went through High School berated and belittled like 'Carrie'. But then she had some satisfaction after the prom.

I suppose if you've set your goal on an MBA or similar type of degree you had to take some sort of a class discussing the various hard-knocks of the business world, the realities of "Not Everyone Is Going To Like You", "Office Politics", or "You Won't Always Be The Boy Wonder". Of course if you weren't business driven, the mythical 'School of Hard Knocks' would teach you something about this along your career path. Maybe it wouldn't happen to you, but you'd be nearby. Sort of like the person next to the person that stepped onto the landmine. It scares you and makes you wary.

Being unemployed changes your life in many ways, not all of them visibly physical, and certainly in many ways emotionally. The obvious is that suddenly your cash flow is strictly negative, unless you can qualify for unemployment benefits (and that's a blog post for another day), or you have sufficient savings to carry you through for a while. The 'experts' say that you should have cash reserves or a savings equivalent to 3-6 months of your typical expenditures. These same 'experts' also spout off on ways to be frugal and cut down to survive joblessness. 'Survive' . . . now that's an interesting word. The dictionary gives several meanings of the word survive, these are two of my favorites: (3) "to get along or remain healthy, happy, and unaffected in spite of some occurrence" and (5) "to endure or live through (an affliction, adversity, misery, etc.)". They seem to cover both ends of the scale don't they, the highs and the lows.

What these so called 'experts' fail to mention is the emotional toll this type of 'life-event' takes on a person, their family, their friends, even their 'community'. Now when I say 'community' I don't mean that the city of Beverly Hills is going to take a personal interest in you, (Well, maybe, I suppose if your topiary aren't trimmed & your lawn jockeys are beginning to flake you will get a letter from the city code division, but I digress.), but your circle of acquaintances will definitely begin to talk and whisper. "Did you hear about poor Clyde? . . . Yes, booted right out. . . . They gave him a box for his 'personal' things . . . Wearing last season's Manolos . . . Had to cancel all his memberships, poor thing." Pity . . . Pity is the acid that eats away at your self-confidence, you've already lost your 'anchors' and sense of who you are, pity eats away from you on the inside, pity can destroy your foundation before you even know it's gone. People who say that they are not their jobs are lying to you and to themselves. In this day and age what we do defines us. Oh there's lots of spin and philosophical discussion otherwise but in a microsecond synopsis of who we are, our jobs are right there in the mix. "He's 5'-2", blond, a dentist" . . . "She has a lovely personality & she's a librarian" . . . "He's nothing much to look at but he works for Prada". Lose that part of your identity and everyone is at a loss to define you, you're the one who has changed and made it harder for them to identify with you. Oh, it's all fun & games at first, but when you start curtailing your activities or use the word 'budget', the game changes. People are willing to perceive you as an equal but when your 'deficiencies' are out in the open, you're not an equal anymore and they're afraid to acknowledge it, and suddenly you begin to be phased out so they won't be uncomfortable. Again, the guy next to the guy who stepped on a landmine.

Survive: (verb, used without object)

"to remain alive after the death of someone, the cessation of something, or the occurrence of some event; continue to live: Few survived after the holocaust."