My Year Of Rest and Relaxation

The One Year Anniversary of Me Getting Laid Off

On March 29th, 2023 at 11:31pm I received an ominous meeting invite from my manager’s manager’s manager. I immediately texted my Dear Friend Kath the following:

my texts are the blue ones

I was mostly amused by the idea of getting fired. I didn’t have an incredibly strong attachment to my job, but Kath, a veteran of Working In Tech, assured me that if I was getting fired my manger would do it. Technically, she was right. I didn’t get fired. The next day, at 9:30am sharp, my manager’s manager’s manager, informed me over Zoom that I was getting laid off. Due to restructuring, my role was rendered obsolete. This was very different from getting fired because it meant that I was The Victim and because I am a Deeply Unserious Person, I recorded the ordeal:

I was relieved to get laid off. My job was a bit of creative purgatory. (I was a Creative Strategist, the title itself is kind of an oxymoron.) It was the kind of job where you had to be creative about deeply uncreative things, like selling bottled water. I could never understand this because if people needed water they would just buy it! Why does a rising starlet need to convince them? (Sydney Sweeney, Hailee Steinfeld, AND Zendaya were the faces of water campaigns I worked on.) But I guess that’s the whole Thing of Advertising. Sorry, I haven’t watched Mad Men yet. IDK.

Hailee Steinfeld for Core Water

Balancing my creative pursuits (YouTuber/aspiring screenwriter) with my somewhat creative day job was an endless hamster wheel. I couldn’t fully commit myself to anything. I always felt guilty for not doing Enough. (Spoiler Alert: this hasn’t gone away.) The only time I felt carefree was when I flung myself into the air for 45 minutes every week. Shout out to trampoline class:

Immediately after getting laid off, I took a long walk to BKLYN CLAY, the premiere pottery studio of Prospect Heights. I wanted to pick up a bowl I crafted the month before on a team outing with my colleagues. When I arrived at the studio, the Clay Barista informed me that if I wanted to pick up my own ceramic creation, I would have to pick up the pieces of my now ex-co-workers too. BKLYN CLAY implemented this policy because too many people forgot to pick up their tchotchkes after they were fired in the kiln. I reveled in informing her that it was not possible for me to collect the other pieces because I had just been laid off so I would probably never see my co-workers again. (Weirdly, I ended up seeing them more after getting laid off. I could finally reveal my True Personality.)

The Clay Barista’s face fell with awkward sympathy. She said she could make an exception. She handed me my red bowl. Except it wasn’t a bowl because there was a hole in the middle of it. I asked why there was a hole and she said that it was a beginner mistake. Apparently I had put too much pressure on the bottom of it. Now I had no job and a non-functional bowl, which felt cosmically hilarious. It was the kind of thing that would happen to a down-on-her-luck character in a mumblecore movie. How Frances Ha of me.

Frances Ha (2012)

I know I titled this “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” but to be honest, I started that book and couldn’t bring myself to continue reading because it was so depressing. It’s a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh about a young woman who attempts to put herself into a prescription drug-induced coma for a year because she can’t find any will to live in the Upper East Side apartment that she inherited from her dead parents. I found it to be very Champagne Problems and as someone who cannot sit still for more than 5 minutes, deeply unrelatable. I still think the title is compelling, hence me copying it for this post.

Technically, my year has not been one of rest and relaxation. There’s been sleepless nights, anxiety, and believe it or not, work. But, relative to the previous few years of my life, this is about as rest-y and relaxation-y as it gets. It was my first time not having a full time job or being a full time student. To be clear, being a Content Creator is a full time job, but I didn’t always treat it as such. I posted on Youtube mainly when I felt like it, or when I was scared that I would sink too far into irrelevance.

Like I mentioned earlier, when you are laid off you are The Victim. But when you get laid off and you don’t look for a new job it’s a choice. And that’s the choice I made. I bravely decided to be Self Employed, or as everyone in my family calls it, Unemployed. Being unemployed is deeply socially stigmatized. And if you’re a man, dare I say unattractive. But because I am in my early 20s (is 24 is early 20s?) being unemployed is a very Girl In A Mumblecore Movie thing to be. If this sounds deeply out of touch and like I have parents who pay my rent, trust me, I don’t. I was at one point $60,000 in debt from student loans. I am not privileged, but I do identity as Charmed. I had this “not-fully-employed-but-not-that-stressed-about-it” year not because of where I came from, but despite it.

Ultimately, I was happy to get laid off because I’m not good at ending things. Someone ripped the band aid off for me. It felt less like an ending and more like a beginning. A chance to be cautiously unrealistic and perhaps to even Follow My Dreams (get paid to be in LA.)

After a year of rest and relaxation, I’m feeling restless. I want to be more occupied. I think this will remind me of how lucky I am to have so much free time; then I’ll actually use it in more productive and creative ways. The job I really want is to be a writer in writer’s room. It could be literally any tv show, except for one of those cop shows that uncles watch. But they don’t post tv writer jobs on LinkedIn. They only post deeply dystopian jobs like “Associate Head Manager of Sales and Vibes.” I’m not exactly sure what to do about this predicament, I’m currently in the process of figuring that out. I want to be more occupied, but I do not want to go to a WeWork in Midtown.

If you were expecting this post to be a recap of my year of rest and relaxation, sorry, I’m not the type of person who enjoys recapping things I did several months ago. I’m more of a reflection girl. Also, it would not be an accurate recap because I would only mention the cool and fun things. You can go to my Instagram to see that. I’m not sure what the future of this Substack looks like, but if you like what you read let me know and maybe I’ll post some more!

With An Itchy Throat,

Amanda <3