A couple of days back, on 14 November, I celebrated two years since my last redundancy. This redundancy was not simply my last in chronological order but will most likely be the last of my life, as I no longer work for someone else and I don’t see that changing any time soon, if ever. Even though I said yesterday that I am glad I now get to water my own grass, I am always brutally honest in disclosing that I would have never pursued this path by my own volition; it is only after 673 applications that I figured I’d better try to make a living out of something else because I sure as fuck was not gonna find another job any time soon, if ever. Despite keeping my profile open to my usual roles for an additional 14 months, I was proven right.
And that’s a really interesting point you know; I know that the vast majority of people who have never been in a redundancy situation [a dying breed but these snow leopards still do exist] cannot, in a month of Sundays, imagine what The Search looks like. A lethal combination of self-determinism peddled by self-help is the exceptionally powerful narrative that still permeates the job seeking landscape. The neoliberal the harder I work, the luckier I get is only something I believed in when I was in my twenties and possibly early thirties. After that point in time, I actually realised that the harder I worked, the more exploited I was, and that the more yeses I responded with to every possible request, and the more expendable I became.
It was only in recent years that I realised the age old keep your head down and don’t rock the boat is career advice that should only be given to those who actively want an axe to fall on their necks without seeing it come. And yet, it was dished out to me too and whilst I did, at least on a few occasions, hear the hissing sound cut through the air and was able to recognise it, the result was the same. As my eyes cast a last gaze across the shopfloor, it was the usual suspects I saw grinning.
Yet, there was a fundamental and almost life-changing shift between my first redundancy [which really did hit me like an axe swung out from the blue of 2008] and this last one [which I had expected for a solid ten months before it actually occurred]; the first one shocked and surprised me and broke my heart and left me in tears; the last one saw me pretty much indifferent as the thought bubble I told you so formed above my head.
Sure, it goes to show that almost two decades [as such was the elapsed time between one and the other], do make the difference to the way in which we experience life events [if a redundancy can even be called a life event and I can certainly tell you that it can, and in many instances, it should]. Last night I happened upon a post on LinkedIn which clocked up hundreds and hundreds of replies from people in the exact same predicament; yes, you’ve guessed it, they are all job seekers, they have all been made redundant, they’ve all been looking for jobs for months, some for over a year, and they all struck me as incredibly well articulate people, one of them with a PhD too, and not at all the sub-level of imbecile that a certain type of person may assume the long-term unemployed is.
There is something in those posts and comments that always pulls at the strings of my heart. Actually… there is something that pulls at them and something else that creeps up my back and to the base of my skull like a slimy cold tentacle of the Kraken; one is the profound touch of empathy and the other is the firm grip of recognition. There is something deeply special about knowing exactly what another human being is experiencing across the miles and across the seas, even as I have never met any of those who commented on that post. If I were a self-help guru [or a goo-roo, as some of us spitefully call them], I would be vomiting unsolicited advice which isn’t in a million years rooted in real life. But I am not a goo-roo; not only do I believe in tough love, I also believe in shattering delusions, such as cream rises to the top. Well, so does shit my friends.