Zen Bender. Stephanie Krikorian
wearing ripped jeans and black suede boots suitable for farming. They had filed out eventually, and when I finally arrived everyone filed back in. And with a prepared statement and limited information from non-human human resources types, it was over.
The magazine would live. The TV show and my career would die.
I was gutted. In slow motion, everybody on the team walked to their desks and made a phone call. I didn’t call anybody right away. I just sat there and stared off into space, feeling humiliated. I’d never experienced anything like this before, and I simply didn’t know what to do.
Later that day, on the subway ride home, I looked at all the people on the B train heading uptown and wondered if they knew I was a loser, who, in three months’ time, would be without a paycheck.
“This will be the best thing that ever happened to you.” I heard that a lot from well-meaning friends when, shell-shocked, I told them what had happened with my job.
I’ll say this as yogically and New-Age-ily as I can, but every single time someone said that to me after I was laid off, as a single-income homeowner facing a mortgage on a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, staring at the end of my thirties—and likely the end of my best days professionally, not to mention for my ovaries—I wanted to literally punch the living crap out of them.
And I’ve never hit anybody. Except my younger sister, Jennifer, but only once, and that was a long time ago.
Even now, after making it through the layoff, I don’t view my experience as “great” or “the best” in any way. To be very clear: Getting laid off was not at the time, nor is it viewed by me today as, the best thing that ever happened to me. Not even close.
Getting a coupon for a free bagel and cream cheese in a gift bag at a charity event was a better, more enjoyable life event. Losing my American Express card somewhere on 72nd Street, then replacing it, only to have the new card fall out of my pocket again two weeks later—basically sprinkling Manhattan with my line of credit but having nobody use either card—was a more thrilling life event than getting laid off.
In fact, rage was all I felt when that sentiment was recklessly tossed my way by well-meaning friends. To this day, I don’t view it as the best thing that ever happened to me, but the worst, maybe. And I concede that, if that’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, I’m an incredibly fortunate person.
Did I get through it? Yes. Over it? No. Not even close.
Only looking back do I see where that sentiment may have come from. They’d all been watching Oprah, too.
The Secret had permeated the collective mindset by that point. Many people were suddenly and breathlessly explaining to me that I could finally “do what I loved!” with my life. (I, by the way, loved working in television news.)
There they were, the first squeaks of self-help-esque optimism. Most everybody seemed gung-ho and on board with the Best Thing attitude. Keep in mind, I was a product of the ‘90s workforce. Work-life balance? What the fuck was that? You worked. Period. I am the daughter of parents who worked every day to provide for their children and the granddaughter of an Armenian immigrant named Mgerdich Krikorian, who walked to work to pour steel in the foundry for a dollar a day so he could send his four children to school. Doing what you loved? Liked, maybe.
Of course, this sentiment was coming from people with paychecks and spouses with paychecks and 401ks and health care—people who were all fine espousing the new-found New Age wisdom, but I don’t recall too many of them leaving their six-figure jobs to practice what they were preaching. There’s a chance that the concept of facing what I was facing seemed a dream to them. Perhaps they were seducing themselves to not have to decide to leave a job they didn’t like and chase a dream? Maybe. Maybe they really did see me as the lucky one.
Still, what New Age way of thinking could possibly suggest that an end to a career that I loved was the best thing? Or was I being too pessimistic in my frustration? Would my mortgage company in fact take a check for “doing what I loved,” or did that require actual money?
Something else that I found weird at that time that always stuck with me: Many people felt the need to point out that things could have been worse. We all knew that. Things can always be worse. It was true.
But it’s not exactly the thing you need or want to hear as you face your own personal end of days.
“At least you don’t have cancer.”
I didn’t. And for that I was grateful. But that didn’t mean my crisis was any easier on me.
One person said it was hard to feel sorry for me because I had so much going for me. Again, the cable company wasn’t taking checks for “stuff I have going for me.”
Plus, there was almost a hierarchy of pity surrounding a city of laid-off people. Many people talked about how badly they felt for “breadwinners”—a.k.a. men with families who had to feed their children and put them through private school. As a single and childless woman with a mortgage, just FYI, I was, and continue to be, the breadwinner in my home, too.
It was like an onslaught of weird advice that Lucy from Peanuts gave to Charlie Brown from her psychiatric booth, and at the time, I simply wasn’t in the mood for, or buying into, it.
Not quite yet anyway, though I was soon to be born again myself.
All the sentiment led to some layoff takeaway that probably goes against the grain of most self-help thinking: Nobody wants to hear the easy-to-offer hypothetical bright side when they are drenched in self-pity and drowning in uncertainty. I did not. I just wanted to soak in my own agony for a while, so I could feel it, and sort through my personal crisis, however great or small it was to someone else; I wanted to acknowledge the pain of it all before taking action to fix it.
Perhaps friends, or society, or whatever we are collectively, don’t want to deal with the discomfort of such a situation. But, looking back, avoiding the struggle that I was feeling wasn’t the answer. Not for me. And not now that I’ve gone through it.
My advice today? When a friend is having a hard time, let her cry it out. Acknowledge: This sucks. Feel it with her. Don’t skimp on agreeing. Tell her, “You have every right to be upset. Take a few days, eat potato chips for breakfast. Stay in your pajamas and watch back-to-back Law & Order repeats. (I have heard that that is a thing…from, uh, a friend.) Feel the sting. Don’t avoid it or look for the sunny side until you’re ready.”
Nobody in crisis needs to hear that it could be worse.
Nobody needs to hear that their anxiety isn’t worthy of a sob fest.
Irrational Panic
In the months that followed getting laid off, I went on thirty-one job interviews. It was a challenging time. It felt like musical chairs. There were jobs, then a chair was pulled away and there were fewer options out there.
People were rapidly getting laid off, dropping like flies. This led me to face the realization that returning to a position in television news, at a certain level on the ladder, was going to be even more of a challenge than I’d thought when the hammer first came down.
I remember a former colleague named Peggy called me the afternoon we’d all gotten the axe because she’d heard about the cutbacks. She connected me with people at her network, and within days, I went in for an interview. I was feeling optimistic. For like five minutes. After lots of initial enthusiasm, I didn’t hear anything back. Why? They had all gotten laid off, too. That didn’t happen just once. It was like dominos at that time, and I was struggling to get out in front of it.
I went for four interviews at a major cable network for a single job. It was a job that I had been qualified for a decade earlier, but still, it was a job and, as my mother might have said, beggars can’t be choosers. It was a morning-show gig and I had done my homework. By the time the fourth and final job interview came around (which meant four different outfits, a stressor for me, by the way), I had spent the week watching the show and charting the segments they had aired. I recorded the competition each day and did the same there,