Welcome to My Laybbatical

“Good things happen slowly and bad things happen fast,” ~ author Abigail Thomas

A photograph of a hummingbird drinking from foxglove. I wish I had taken a photo, but they are too fast for me. Source: Ardea Wildlife Pets Environment

This weekend I attended a midsommer party at our friends’ home in the Catskills. We made crowns out of foraged wildflowers and erected a maypole and listened to Swedish pop and Christmas songs. It was a perfect antidote to the 4th of July malaise I was feeling and the surreal haze of having just been laid off. 

“You were laid off?” a partygoer congratulated, as we stood around the beautifully laid out buffet of traditional Swedish foods like pickled herring, meatballs and smörgåstårta. Everyone around the table joined in with big smiles and beaming faces. 

I found myself smiling back with surprise, still unsure of how I felt about the situation—not quite excited, not quite depressed. I’ve been riding a roller coaster of complicated feelings and uncertainty. 

Midsommer is a pagan northern European holiday celebrating the start of summer, the metaphor of light defeating darkness. I liked the sound of the tradition as I struggled to find the light. I am grieving the loss of my job, my team who stayed and my team* who left on the same day, and the friends at work with whom I’d shared the past years of tumult and joys. But I also feel a sense of expansion, an opportunity to hit reset. As my friend reflected, it is fitting that my last day fell on the start of the Independence Day holiday weekend. 

“Celebrate your freedom,” she said. 

It’s only been a week, but being laid off is forcing me to try to slow down and reflect on my life. As with other moments of crisis in my life, I know this is essential for my happiness and well-being. A secondary definition for the word layoff, according to Merriam Webster, is “a period during which someone does not take part in a customary sport or other activity.” Read: a period when one slows the f- down. I’ve decided to call this my laybbatical. Time to reflect, time to study all that is and all that I want.

But it’s not that easy. I am struck by how many people have counseled me to take this time to slow down before making a decision of where to go next. I politely nod my head yes as each person shares that advice, unsure I even really know how to do that outside of a few days of vacation. A now-former teammate told me she hadn’t once seen me truly log off when I took vacation. And even when I took an abbreviated leave late in 2020 after Oscar’s death and the start of the pandemic, it was only for a few days a week, and just a few weeks in total. As they suggest I slow down I feel myself pushing down phantom generational fear around the consequences of little work and fear of an inevitably shallow well of a financial safety net, no matter how good we’ve been at saving that emergency fund. I am fortunate beyond anything I imagined, but I know how tenuous the net can become for many of us at any moment. I have felt that deep in my belly and tight shoulders for decades. 

Despite relative career success, I have always felt a lingering anxiety that long term financial security is just out of reach, and that the hustle is the only way to secure a safe future. Add to that a historically chronic need for validation (still working on that one) and I have been going non-stop since enrolling in community college after I got clean in my mid-20s, working a full time job while attending school, and transferring to Columbia one week before 9/11 while still working, never stopping despite the world-shifting trauma. I know I was trying to prove my self worth in school back then, chasing the cum laude degree I earned, then following up that hustle with an advanced degree in journalism and an often exciting climb to the top of the journalism and media heap. The work often came with ego-inflating accolades and velocity that took on a certain glint of glitter for all to see. No wonder I am afraid to let it go. 

The hardest part of change is not knowing what the next day or phase of life will look like, and in that grip of fear we (I) resist change. With that said, I know very well that the first step is to surrender, and in order to do that I must slow down–and ask for help doing that.  

When I have finally learned to slow down—sometimes by colliding head-on with the metaphorical brick wall of my own poor judgment, sometimes by stepping away—I am able to surrender to the present moment, to cease struggling, to cease resisting. Only then can I see life with any clarity, have faith that it will unfold at its own pace, find a lifeline of hope, and take the next right step forward with grace and a renewed sense of vitality.

That is what I am trying to do now, whether its gardening in the yard, reading Mary Oliver, watching the hummingbird visit each evening at dusk. She is moving so fast, yet is suspended in midair, sucking the nectar from the flowers and enjoying herself for that one pause before flying off. Perhaps I can take a few long breaths and watch the iridescent winged beauty take her nightly drink and feel happy for the change that awaits her at the next garden, far out of sight but certain as the sun that sets each night.

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*Please reach out to me if you are looking for very talented editorial, social media, marketing and video editing teammates. I have much to tell you about them. You’d be lucky to have them join your team. Reach out. Let me gush about them.

PS My poetry reading has been rescheduled for Wednesday, July 12, at 6:30 p.m. at Bruce’s Garden in Inwood (11 Park Terrace East). <3