Part One
The most significant thing that happened to me in 2024 was that I got laid off. In practical terms, it was not my fault – cash flow was exhausted, my salary did not move from the capital project to the operational budget, and when the company madly stripped out every non-essential cost, I was sacked. The details make for a galling story, but then, everyone has one. They cut me unexpectedly, without warning, and without any runway. That said, I was not caught in a thresher. My role was singular, my contributions my own and significant. When the bosses evaluated me, I was on a list of one. Someone had to say, and everyone else had to agree, that they thought they could do without me. Given what I know about the organization, someone probably thought they could do better without me. I have a fondness for the English term here – redundancy.
What I did next was precarious. I was in a lonely state. Work can mean many things, but for most folks it means a job and the things you do within that job. Once I was laid off, and once I had finished a period of retching – sprawling on the bed and moaning was my style – I was perilously of my own devices. I had no work to occupy my time, and more importantly, I had no grounds to consider or reflect on the work I had done. That work was not mine anymore. I had done it for pay, for someone else, and I had left it with them when they weren’t going to pay me anymore. Pretty shortly after I dusted myself off, I concluded that it would be a bad idea to spend any time thinking about that work, trying to learn from the experience, or contemplating what I might have done, especially at a personal level, to make myself redundant. Otherwise, I would conduct arguments with imagined versions of my enemies, false interlocutors who nevertheless possessed an eternally accurate rejoinder: it doesn’t matter how right you are, because you don’t work here now. Coming to that conclusion was, of course, a decision I made – a decision to creates parameters for my thinking. When I say that this was a precarious decision, I mean that it established a limit to self-reflection. It took six months to get a job, so I spent six months in stasis, not learning from my mistakes or trying to grow from my experience. To do anything other than that was to risk a depression that I feared would become too powerful to overcome.
So I rode it out. Thus, a full half of 2024 – at least, the part that was wholly my own, not shared with family or in the company of friends or as a citizen or a person in the culture – was static suspension. In that way, I lost the year.
A Very Nice Dog 