Another Layoff
Hello, my friend. Welcome back. I’m thankful you’re here.
This week has been unexpectedly challenging in my household. It’s taken me the entire week to process the emotions and because of that, I’m writing to you on Friday night, hours before this post goes live. Normally I queue my posts at least a week in advance which probably gives some insight into the extreme emotions I needed to deal with. As you could probably tell by the title, there was another layoff. It wasn’t me this time. It was my partner, Daniel. In an extremely surprising move, Monday afternoon we found out that he and 530 other coworkers were getting laid off immediately. This layoff has been much more difficult to process because his paycheck was significantly more important to our household income than mine ever was. We also haven’t fully recovered from my unemployment last year either.
Daniel has been through similar situations in the past because the game industry is just kind of like this. But my experience has been very different. Every time I’ve been laid off or fired, there was no severance package at all and I was basically just kicked out on my ass and told to go away and the pay was immediately cut off. This situation hasn’t been that bad, thankfully. There has been a severance package that will keep us afloat for a little while, but it doesn’t resolve the low rumble of anxiety in my gut about the whole situation.
This led to an interesting but constructive chat with Daniel last night. I shared that I was also trying to process the feelings of his layoff and he interpreted it differently from just my wanting to share my struggle with my emotions. He said “It’s not like I’m sitting around doing nothing all day!” and that he felt like I was putting pressure on him to take a job as soon as possible even though I never said anything directly or specifically to that vein.
Now I’ve heard those exact words come out of my own mouth about 6 months ago and that was a red flag for me that this was something deeper that needed to be worked out. We reflected together. It was important to me to hash this out because I didn’t want him to believe a narrative that wasn’t true. The first thing I checked in with him about was his self-talk.
In moments with major life changes, a person’s self-talk can easily swing dramatically toward the negative. If you aren’t observant of how you talk to yourself you might start to believe misplaced blame your brain may want to put on yourself. Daniel was laid off, which means that the company screwed up and they have to let people go to ensure its own survival. It sucks but the blame is on the company, not on Daniel. I checked in with him about his self-talk first to make sure the source of the pressure he described wasn’t coming from there.
Secondly, we discussed the unexpected role reversal we were experiencing. I pointed out that half a year ago, I was the unemployed one in our unit. I asked Daniel if he put pressure on me to find additional income from somewhere else. He said he didn’t. But I pointed out that even though he wasn’t outwardly expressing pressure, I still felt it anyway because I didn’t want everything to fall on his shoulders and stress him out. I still felt pressure. Now, half a year later we are completely in each other’s shoes. I am employed and he is the one laid off. I reminded him that I have an anxiety disorder and I told him that I will have a low level of brewing anxiety at all times until we get on the other side of this. It is just a state of being for me. Especially because there is literally nothing I can do to help him. Actively doing nothing is stupidly hard when all you want to do is help. He realized the pressure he felt was because he didn’t want me feeling anxious. He was basing his emotions about this on something he had no control over and that I only have a minimal amount of control over with medicine and therapy. He needed to accept that this was going to just be a constant for me and that he wouldn’t be able to resolve it immediately like he wanted. The same as me not being able to help resolve his employment situation and finding new work will just take a little bit of time. Basically, I can’t fix it immediately like I want to.
So we are both kind of just stuck in a medium place with this right now. It’s not great, but it’s also not the absolute worst either. I’m generally stressed out, but I also know Daniel is doing actionable steps every day to work on our current reality. I’m doing my best not to have full-blown panic attacks. (I only had one this week, which isn’t too bad for me.)
What I’m proud of this week is that we were able to communicate with each other and talk through what each of us was going through. I’ve experienced in past relationships a partner that basically just shuts down and goes totally cold, or they pretend nothing happened, or they blame you for even wanting to talk about it. Daniel and I were able to talk and express ourselves and make sure each of us felt heard. It takes practice to talk like this and I know I still screw it up sometimes. But we both always come back to the table to try again.
And sometimes the table is in fantasy Swiss Alps
And I guess when one door closes, another one opens. But ya know. Good luck finding it.
So yeah, I guess the tl;dr version is, Daniel got laid off, I’m an anxious mess. We’re still together. Feelings.
This post didn’t have the most direction today. But thank you for being here with me while I continue to work through this. I’ll update you when there is good news regarding his situation. Until then, perhaps next week I will do another cruise post? Let me know in the comments what you think about that idea!
Kristen
P.S. I’m very tired writing this on a Friday night. I hope you liked all of the sassy gif images.
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