May Days

I know you’ve been wondering where I’ve been.

By you, I mean my most loyal reader, Uncle Steve. Hi, Steve.

I got laid off in February. From a company I truly cared about and believed in. In the first two minutes of my deeply impersonal Zoom video layoff, I was told, “Please remember you are not to badmouth the company in any way online.”

What I actually remembered, then:

• A company does not breathe, and so, it does not care.

• Believing in a place of work is foolish because work and workplaces are, by nature, coercive—especially in this star-spangled b-hole we call home. My health insurance is dependent upon the whims of an over-paid few? Better believe that, bitch.

• Work will never, ever, love you back.

So. I’ve spent two months not badmouthing a company, and the bodies who run it, online. I’ve not publically demeaned anyone for playing chess with people’s lives, for making promises they won’t keep, for treating humans like numbers, and convincing themselves it’s for the good of a collective that does not, has never, existed.

Because work is not a collective. A company is not a collective. Employment as a concept is not a collective. Work is a demand to be met. Rent is due and mammograms are due and our dignity is the only thing that is not, is rarely, due.

I’m really proud of myself for not badmouthing this company in any way online. I believe this is called restraint.

Grappling. Grappling is a word this company and its parts used often, to name how we were expected to encounter “problems.” When you join a company, it comes with its own set of rules and vocabulary and quirks. I’ve been grappling with my tendency to go ALL IN, really HAM TO THE WALL, with ideas and concepts and workplaces. I’m grappling with this compulsion to join groups that say they can, THEY WILL, make things better and different, even as they can’t see the forest for the trees—the workers before the work, the community before the end product.

Since February 28th I’ve been, hmmm, licking my wounds? Tending my garden? All of these sound euphemistic in ways I don’t intend. Getting laid off is not at all as sexy as it sounds.

I’ve been grieving, really. Fuming. Recalibrating. Doing so as students are kidnapped off the streets for being anti-genocide. As people are kidnapped and sent to countries they've never been to, even as the courts say the government cannot legally fucking do just that. The white collar woes of LinkedIn feel laughable, but believe this, bitch, nobody is laughing. Everyone is laid off and floundering. The edtech industry has been gutted by T-Rump policies. And AI has already taken so many jobs. AI certainly got mine. (Hope AI schedules his doctor appointments soon, no telling how long he’ll have that Blue Cross Blue Shield so-called coverage. Five thousand dollar deductible, I hardly knew ye!)

Unrelated: today, my mom wanted to argue with me about pronouns and bathrooms.

Here’s what I’ve really done for two point five months now. I’ve laid prepostionally (in, on, about, around) my hammock in the backyard and stared up at the sky and wondered, This?

This is how it goes down?

Society crumbles and most of us just pretend it’s not happening??? I have my first ever 401K and it goes into a pretend market while people who are starving and unhoused need that money right now? I suppose we ignored unhoused, starving people in the Before, so why not During? And what even is After, if most of us can just glide through fascism, unscathed? Or a tiny bit scathed, but still able to have a gym membership! We face climate collapse, we turn on the air conditioning a bit sooner! The Met Ball continues! We move from screen to screen to watch commentary on the end of it all, and we shake our heads and do nothing about it!

I am not feeling particularly hopeful, and if you’ve made it this far in my blog/sub/stack/post/cry for help, you may (hi, Uncle Steve) be thinking, wow, I really need to unsubscribe. Like, she is harshing my mellow. And I get it. I live with me. I’m in my own head.

But am I the only one in this place? Not inside my head, but in this place of despairing, unfocused, unfunctioning rage? I watch this second presidency unfurl and hear him say all the quiet parts out loud, laying bare the stupid, ugly, pathetic, sexist, racist, eugenicist ideologies this ChRiSTiAn NaTiOn is (only slightly) better at hiding in Democrat hands, and I wonder, now what?

But there’s only one answer, right?

Back to work.