Resilience is the Key to Surviving a Layoff
Posted on | November 29, 2011 | No Comments
By Eileen Briesch
For Displaced Journalists
Two years ago, I got the word: Your life is ending. The career for which you worked the past 30-plus years
Eileen Briesch
is over. It was a normal Friday night, and then it wasn’t. We were going to order pizza from my favorite pizza place, and I was going around asking who wanted in. Then my boss came in and said I needed to come with him. I felt my chest tighten, the throat constrict, the tears start to well up. I thought everyone was looking at me as I walked down the hall with my boss. Then Andy said, “It was nothing that you did.”
Then why was I losing my job, the only thing I’ve ever done in my life? Why was I losing my life?
Other people had husbands and families and kids. They had lives. I had nothing else but this career I had built. This was my life. And now it was gone. It was being pulled out from under me, like a rug, and I was falling down, tripping helplessly to the floor. I tried to stop the tears, but couldn’t. Why, why me, if I did nothing wrong? What was wrong with me?
It was like death, I realized. I left the office that night, went to commiserate with other coworkers who had been “killed” that night, who were losing their jobs. Then I was home by myself to cry, to contemplate my death, my new life after death.
Getting laid off is like a disease. The next day, I had to go back to work (it was part of the severance package; we had to work until our actual layoff date 60 days later). I felt like I had a disease, and everyone was afraid to get too close to me, afraid they’d catch the disease, too. The first two days were tough, because first, you cry. Then you want to fight back, you want revenge. And eventually, you say, “Ah, hell, the sun will come up and I’ll be stronger for this.”
And you know what? I am. There have been other layoffs at that company, and I feel like I’m going through it all over again, with every one of my former coworkers. I’m walking down that hall with them, feeling the tears well up again. I don’t know what the journey will be like for them. I know my journey has changed me so much. It has made me dig deep to dip into my reserves, some that I didn’t know were there.
I did land on my feet eventually. I got a new job. Maybe it’s not the world’s best one, but it’s a job and it pays the bills. Wherever life takes me now, I know this experience has changed me for the better. As my psychologist told me before I left Michigan for Louisiana, “You are an amazing woman.”
Yeah, I am.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Welcome to Our Community
Is there life – or work – after newspapers? A lot of us are in the process of finding out. Because it’s generally a somewhat lonely endeavor, it struck me, in January 2010, that it might be comforting – and possibly very productive – to go through it together.
Displaced Journalists is a community – our community – where we find common ground, where we can begin to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get on with our lives and livelihoods. [more]