The other day went for a long walk with Riz around South Croydon. I wandered into the high street camera shop, the local hang out for photographers and other Leica-philes (the camera not me!) and chatted for a bit while Riz politely accepted as many rich tea biscuits as the shop owners would offer. When we left the shop I popped my headphones back on just in time to hear:
“You’re Fired!”
Why is that such a frightening phrase? Well if you look at things from a biological point of view it’s easy to see why. Humans come into the world in an extremely vulnerable state and we have to depend on one another totally for relatively longer than the young of any other creature. It’s no wonder we panic when we are told to go away. Those words awaken a very deep, very early fear of abandonment within us.
I suspect the distress is even more acute for women than it is for men. Women in our society are still raised to please others so to be rejected is somehow to fail. On the other hand, men hardly escape unscathed. We teach everyone, but especially our boys, to define themselves by what they do, rather than who they are. So if you do nothing, it’s very easy to feel you are nothing.
So on the face of this what can you do? As an agony aunt I’ll offer you three guidelines for anyone who’s lost their job:
1. Give yourself permission to grieve. It’s okay to feel really upset when you lose your job, in fact you really need to feel really upset, because it’s only then you can start to rebuild your life realistically. But at the same time you need to keep going in order to find another means of livelihood. So what are the best ways to do this?
2. Create a daily routine. Even if you have to invent it, make a schedule. People become less employable over time because they lose the ability to fit in to the structure and routines necessary for most job. Don’t let that happen to you.
3. Continue to socialise. Contact a friend or a relative every day and meetup often. Social skills are every bit as important as technical skills - more so I think. And they need to be practiced regularly. This is another reason people become less employable. They lose confidence in social situations and this shows in job interviews.
Finally I’d like to mention a frequently overlooked player here. The person who has to give to the bad news. It’s incredibly stressful to tell a colleague they must go away. I’ve never known anybody who has enjoyed doing this. My experience is in fact that the sacker suffer in their way every bit as much as their victims. They just don’t dare show it publicly.
The American woman on the radio continued to discuss the loss of a job in terms of grieving and bereavement.
It’s the most important thing - it’s recognising you have had a loss. You have to recognise the size of the loss and the pain of the loss in order to fill the gap. You can’t see the dimensions otherwise…It is about the fear of loss. Suddenly [you realise] “I’m not what I was.”
It was The Guardian’s agony aunt, Linda Blair, on an episode or Radio 4’s “Off the Page”
I agree almost completely with what Linda said, though I’d phrased the second item as “Create a daily routine that doesn’t include any daytime television, ever.”
I disagree completely on one point, however: that it’s as hard to sack someone. When I was a manager I had to fire people, though in every case it was a young man who still lived at home and had a few issues with the responsibilities expected of them, and they weren’t in jeopardy of not being able to pay the bills. I suppose knowing that ameliorates the guilt.
Being sacked really is much worse. Especially being sacked neither for poor performance nor issues with responsibilities. In my case I became ill in an environment that wasn’t particularly supportive, which in turn exacerbated the illness. Eventually I needed to be signed off for a couple of weeks and that earned me the sack.
So, if Linda is right, it’s time to grieve, ironically.
Ironically?
Yes.
Last year, in the last week in July I found myself without three people with whom I was very close. In one case the friend and I fell out in a very unpleasant way, in one very sad story, my friend died and in the last scenario I didn’t really “lose” the friendship, but…well it’s complicated. A good friend’s life changed in several ways for the better, which is great, but for complicated reasons it meant we couldn’t hang out anymore. It was also the same week my dog my dog became ill with an e-coli bacteria infection.
In a week most of my world as I knew it was no more. And without going into best-forgotten and depressing details it was going to get worse before it got better.
So grieved and I grieve my losses still. The grief turned into depression and the job I’d just started tolerated very little of it and eventually fired me.
I don’t mind being sacked. I could have quit, and wanted to often. I hated the job to be perfectly honest. But for various personal reasons I stuck it out as best I could.
But Linda spoke truthfully in my estimation. When you get sacked your employer essentially says you’re not wanted anymore. And that hurts as much as losing a friend sometimes. When I lost my job I was marched out of the building, no chance to exchange email addresses or say goodbye. Even just writing about it is difficult and I find myself having to stop to wipe my eyes frequently.
Loss, any loss, hurts and grieving is natural.
What is grief? Famously, it’s five stages we go through after loss (aka “Kübler-Ross model”): Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
Wikipedia has a pretty good definition, albeit long, but worth a read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grief
I also consider forgiveness a necessary part of the process.
Then again…
Americans wear their hearts on their sleeves. We emote early and often. But in the UK that’s not the done thing. I heard on Radio 4 the other day it takes UK war veterans an average of 14 years to seek help for emotional problems such as post-traumatic stress. Not showing emotions seems de rigeur amongst the geek crowd as well. And with good reason, signs of weakness are exploited early and often for comedic gain, regardless of the consequences sometimes.
I decided the best thing was to start isolating from the old crowd and find new friends and acquaintances. In order to meet new people and socialise I put on my happy face when I went out and isolated when I didn’t feel up to it.
It took a long time before I started to express any anger. Fortunately, I found supportive people who listened and sympathised. I admit freely I spend too much time on the ‘net, and I’ve been textually slammed for it by the old crowd. But to be honest I don’t care. I connected to some absolutely amazing people and I am eternally grateful for it and them.
Society may lose “community” in a geographical sense, but community spirit is alive and well and living online.
Just having people listen, or often, just read, and offer support helps enormously.
As for the anger, being angry is hard. I think societal norms dictate women be sympathetic, nurturing and understanding. Certainly my familial norms dictated I always be the on the receiving end of anger and my getting angry was not to be tolerated.
And even if we get angry, at whom do we point this anger? I struggle with that. I bristle at inconsiderate commuters or obtuse and unhelpful customer service people. On Saturday I returned from a photowalk with friends. Turning around to look at the departure board, my well-filled rucksack apparently brushed a child behind me. Her mother started poking me in the ribs and yelling “you just hit my child!” I lost my temper and told her I was sorry I accidentally hit her child, I apologised to the child, then had a long, loud rant about poking people in the ribs being a completely inappropriate response. But my response was as well, and I know, down deep, the anger was more to do with my dog’s health than anything else.
But when someone you love is ill, dies or goes away, or for that matter, you lose a job or anything you value, where do you point the anger? I can’t be angry at my dog for being sick, or my friend for dying, or my other friend for getting a busy life.
Well one way to diffuse those feelings is by trying forgiving and forgetting. I know, it’s not easy. Some of us heal slowly. I can grind my teeth when I think about some of the bad luck I’ve had. Quite a lot of my “bad luck” entailed people not handling their anger appropriately either. But being angry at the angry causes bad will to ping-pong back and forth until everyone is miserable, and I don’t want that either. So I’m trying my best to forgive, forget or ignore any more ill will, past and present. Everyone has problems. I hope I can do my best to empathise rather than react.
Maybe forgiveness is the antidote to anger.
