10 Years ago this month, I was laid off from my first job out of college. I had been working there for almost a year. The economy tanked and people were getting let go from their jobs every day. Dad took a buy-out deal from his job that May. It was a Friday morning and I had spent the previous night in the hospital until 1:30am with Dad visiting Grandpa in intensive care. Went home, slept a few hours and went to work. I was laid off around 10am and had until 3pm to pack up my stuff and leave. 4 days later Grandpa died. Those two events changed my life and the course of my career forever. Dad and I spent the rest of the summer cleaning out Grandpa’s house and getting ready to sell it. I made my mandatory phone calls to unemployment in that house while cleaning, throwing stuff away and staying out of the way of the painters, electricians, and plumbers Dad hired to help us.
Sometimes I get mad about it. Getting laid off completely derailed my life. My whole career. Boom. Done. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I had a very hard time getting a job after that. The interviewers all asked me, “Why you? Why did they pick YOU?” to be laid off. I felt like I was being blamed for something I didn’t do. Grandpa dying changed the way I dealt with grief. I had to hold it together because Dad couldn’t. Mom was at work and my sister was living in Utah at the time. Just me to hold everything together. I carried a lot on my shoulders that year. It wasn’t until the next summer that I cried. I was at an event and met a veteran of the Korean War and I started talking to him and told him about my Grandpa. He then gave me an Army pin off his jacket and I burst into tears. I sobbed uncontrollably outside the event center for 45 minutes while my friends tried to calm me down.
I worked part-time jobs for 5 years. I remember being so happy to get my $110 retail job paycheck and take it to the bank to cash it. I remember getting the receipt for my deposit and seeing that my account balance before cashing that check was $2.82. I will never forget that ever. I put myself through a certificate program at EMU to change my career and try to get a full-time job. I eventually landed a full-time job.
Sometimes when I know someone is judging me because they see I have something “nice” I really want to say to them, “Yeah well you didn’t know me when I had $2.82 in my bank account! It wasn’t always this way. I didn’t get this handed to me.” Maybe I’ll start saying that! haha
I’m not going to sit here and tell you I think it was all meant to be and I have some great life now that all those bad things happened to me. Nope. But what I do know, is that I am strong and I did this myself. The life I have now is because I worked hard and made decisions FOR ME. I feel lucky almost that I was so young and I just powered through it like a freight train. I did what I thought I had to do. I have learned more in the last 10 years than at any other point in my life.