Hold it in your hands
Two Januaries ago, the morning after returning from a week-long vacation with my father and some of my best friends, I woke up to an email from the editor-in-chief of the digital publication where I’d worked for three-and-a-half years. It was a Google Calendar invitation requesting my presence at a meeting that morning, and I knew as soon as I saw it in my inbox what it meant. I was about to lose my job.
Anyone who’s spent any time in newsrooms in the last twenty years, and especially the last ten, knows the lay-offs drill by now. I knew the anxiety of swirling rumours, and the depressing announcement tweets, and the panic of imagining yourself back out on the job market along with thousands of talented and experienced journalists who had also been laid off and were also applying for those few steady jobs you wanted. I knew what the newsroom felt like the day of, and the morning after. Solemn, tense, relieved, resentful, guilty.
I had been through two or three rounds of lay-offs at this job already, and I had always dodged the bullet. But this time, I wasn’t going to be one of the lucky ones. My whole team, bar one person, was axed, and our entire section of the publication — a section I’d built from scratch a year earlier and had been so proud to run — was eliminated. I was working remotely from Iowa, not from the New York newsroom. In New York, the lucky ones bought drinks for the unlucky ones at the unofficial company bar across the street. It was my first winter in Iowa, and my partner was out of town, so I was alone in my apartment. Also, it was about -50 degrees outside.
A bad situation was made worse by a right-wing targeted harassment campaign: for more than a week, white supremacists and far-right trolls bombarded me and my former colleagues with online abuse, delighted by our misfortune. Also, I don’t know if I mentioned this, but it was -50 degrees outside and I am Australian.
That was two years ago, almost to the day. I found my feet in the months that followed, cobbling together teaching and freelancing and part-time editing work. I socked away as much of my severance as I could manage. The trolls got bored and moved on to new victims. My depression — the exhausted sense that I don’t want to be here but I’m too tired to think of a place where I do want to be — subsided, and the panic attacks stopped. I hurried to finish my book proposal, and my agent sold my book. The weather warmed up.
In the weeks after I was laid off, well-intentioned people told me stories about people they knew who had lost their jobs and discovered that it was actually the best thing that ever happened to them. I would muster a close-mouthed smile, thank them, and then turn away and roll my eyes. I resist the notion that bad things are actually good, if only we look at them the right way. Bad things are bad, and the last thing I wanted to do in the middle of experiencing a Bad Thing was to feel guilty for failing to look hard enough for a silver lining. Fuck silver linings, I thought, I just lost my health insurance, and that is a Bad Thing. The existence of a Good Thing that would not have happened without the Bad Thing happening first does not magically make the Bad Thing not bad. There is no beneficial suffering. “It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me” is sometimes true, but most of the time, it is a lie we tell ourselves to make the suffering seem worth it.
But there are good things. Because I haven’t had a full-time job for the last two years — because lay-offs have forced me, like so many journalists, into a gig-life, a cobbled-together career where we aren’t physically in a newsroom from 9 to 5 every day — I’ve had some control over my schedule. Which means that I’ve been able to report and write a book, and then get to work on a second one (about which more later).
And this week, almost two years to the day since I lost a dream job, another dream was delivered, this time to my physical inbox.
These are advance reader’s copies of Turning Pointe, for people who’ll write blurbs that go on the back cover, and for reviewers. When they arrived, I wanted to rip open the package immediately, but instead I sat on the living room carpet and held it for a few minutes, feeling the chill of the letterbox fade from the golden yellow envelope. I knelt on the ground and tried to imprint the moment in my memory so I could have it forever.
It is another January here in Iowa, and outside it’s in the mid-teens. Once again, my partner was out of town and once again, I was alone. There was no one around to record the moment or remember it for me. It was just me, holding my Good Thing in my shaking hands. For more than two years, it had lived on Google Docs and loose lead paper. Now, it is bound, a real thing I can touch and feel and leaf through and think, look at all these words, who the fuck wrote all these words? I wrote all those words.
Was the Bad Thing secretly a Good Thing? No. But this? It feels damn good.
Thanks, as always, for reading. As a reminder, you can call your local bookstore and or pre-order this good thing, and get a copy to hug yourself on the day it comes out, May 4, which is just a few short months away.
Chloe.