calm calamities
Dear friend —
My life in quarantine is a contradiction.
On the surface, the day-to-day is quiet. Each 24 hours I do much the same things: write, read, yoga, walk, talk with friends, sleep, repeat.
Simultaneously, the drama of the last few months have rendered my life unrecognizable. I’m in a new house in a new city in a new state — one with dusty saguaro and postcard sunsets and tiny wild rabbits hopping through the streets and sudden monsoons that trigger flash flood emergency alerts. In my Airbnb, I live among a stranger’s things, sleep in a stranger’s bed. Most of my own stuff has been given away or sold, including my old car, which I recently traded in for a newer ride that still takes me a minute to recognize as my own.
To top it off, I quit my job last month.
Basically, I’ve gone from being a tech industry marketer in a major metropolitan area to an unemployed, semi-homeless writer recluse in the desert.
And yet, my daily experience of living hasn’t changed much at all.
Have you noticed how most of life’s big changes happen in a moment, a mere blip before things return to the status quo? A minute to give your landlord notice you’re moving out. A minute to book an Airbnb. A minute to tell your boss see ya. A morning to drive your old car into a car dealership and drive out with a new one — then in the afternoon you’re back to your regularly scheduled programming. Driving from Los Angeles to Tucson takes seven hours — and at your destination you find you’re still much the same person. Same habits, same responsibilities, same desires —
I have never attempted suicide, but I’ve wondered what it must feel like to wake up the day after a serious attempt. You thought it was all over, but now it’s just another day, and you have to do all the mundane errands of daily life again, brushing your teeth, making your bed —
To be clear, I’m not disappointed that life doesn’t feel more changed. I’m merely marveling at how undramatic dramatic changes can feel.
Undramatic drama is how I’d describe my former job — and my decision to quit, too. In many ways, work life got even more placid and serene for me after the coronavirus crisis hit. No more commuting! No more noisy people in the open plan office! No more temptations of free breakroom snacks! No more having to see that one person I didn’t like at work! She still showed up in my Zoom meetings but I could cover her face with another window and hit mute if necessary! And I could get my work done laying in bed if I wanted! I had more time to fiddle with my novel! It was all chill and fantastic.
But the tech company I worked for was not doing so fantastically. Overnight, the company went from a hiring frenzy to layoff planning. Soon, close to a fifth of my coworkers were gone, including my favorite work buddy. A couple weeks after that, another handful of people were made redundant.
A few weeks later I got more big news: The company was splitting in two! The half that I worked for had been acquired by a bigger company, which meant a big infusion of cash for both sides of the business to forestall further layoffs. Despite the jarring realization that I and my work could so easily get sold to another company without my having any say in the matter, I thought, okay, maybe this could be a good thing.
Then a week after that, the new CEO of my half of the company asked me to Zoom. There, he said I’d now have to report to that one person I didn’t like.
I quit on the spot, politely, agreeing to stay around a few more weeks to help with the transition.
My decision surprised the CEO — and prompted friends from work to call to tell me they thought me courageous. The whole experience made me realize just how few people would have done what I did: immediately quit a job I knew I no longer wanted.
What I recommend, if you’d like a similar level of choice, is saving money. Call it your freedom fund, call it your fuck you fund. But that fund is truly important to have, because you don’t know what you’ll need to walk away from.
When I was a child, I wanted my mother to leave my father. She couldn’t; she was financially dependent on him. Growing up seeing the verbal and emotional abuse she put up with, I made a promise to myself that that would never be me — I wouldn’t ever put myself in a position where I couldn’t leave.
So even when I wasn’t making much money, I always made sure to save. And perhaps because I’ve pretty much always had a fuck you fund, my tolerance for putting up with bad situations seems to be a lot lower than the average person’s. I have a friend who’s stayed at a company that’s not only refused to give her a raise for multiple years, but also cut her pay significantly when coronavirus came around. I have multiple friends living with critical partners they don’t even really like anymore.
I realize that many people today are forced to live hand to mouth and simply are unable to save at all — so the fact that I have savings is a mark of privilege. But most of you reading this love note are also similarly privileged. Most of you have the option to build a fuck you fund, whether or not you’ve actually done so.
Have you? And if so, have you ever dipped into it? Tell me about a time you’re proud to have used your fuck you fund. I really want to know.
Calamities continue at my previous company. The week after I quit my job, the CEO of the other side of the company suddenly stepped down. The week after that, the new CEO of that side of the company declared a new round of layoffs.
Meanwhile, I’m still living my placid days in Tucson. My last day of work was Friday — and since then I’ve been doing the same things — except I spend some of the time I used to work looking for a new job.
The search is going well! The undramatic drama continues —
Love,
Siel
P.S. Three links you might enjoy:
I reviewed The Disaster Tourist — a Korean novel about a travel company that caters to people’s love of gawking at accidents — for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“After my marriage ended, I started having the sex I really wanted.”
P.P.S. Recent books I read: Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, Stephen King’s On Writing, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, Philip Roth’s Everyman, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and Rufi Thorpe’s The Girls From Corona Del Mar.