figuring it out again

pardon this rant

when i went to college, it was fall 2010 and the seniors from the previous spring had graduated into a horrible recession-impacted job market. “there are no jobs right now,” my j-school professors said. i internalized this brutal reality a little too much as an inevitability for myself and braced for impact, but in 2014 there were nothing but vc-funded media outlets for me to graduate into, which i did. i supported nearly every friend in journalism i had through rounds of layoffs between 2015 and 2020, avoiding layoffs myself before transitioning my career. i left the marketing agency i worked at in 2021 and went to go work for a saas startup, which laid me off on august 1, 2022. and then, yesterday, on july 13, 2023, 19 days before the one-year anniversary of my first layoff, i was laid off from the early stage vc firm that had scooped me up last august.

i know how improbable this sounds. even in a shitty job market it feels statistically unlikely to get laid off twice in a year. “maybe she’s just bad at her job,” you may be musing. but you would be wrong. i know i did a good job because in addition to fulfilling all the basic responsibilities of my role — content strategy and execution, earned media for our firm and our dozens of portfolio companies, live event programming — i took a small, early stage vc firm with the least-seo friendly name possible and gave it something it didn’t have, something intangible and hard to measure, especially with near-zero resources and a one-person content, editorial and comms team: brand awareness. people were talking about our companies and our firm and telling our associates they were hearing about us. i was so proud of the work i did over the past 10 months. i had so much more i wanted to do. but now i find myself in the increasingly familiar but no less horrible position of being cast out and scrambling, and with no severance.

i don’t say this for sympathy but just to give an update on where i’m at. i have some promising contract work i’m lining up but nothing in stone yet (again: i got laid off 32 hours ago). i’m trying to give myself grace and be patient and not dive into work immediately where i can find it, but that’s easier said than done without a safety net. my parents have always proudly said that they never need to worry about me or my sister jackie — we’ve always done well for ourselves — but that’s because we’ve always had to do well for ourselves. there is no trust fund, or family apartment for us to crash at, or savings for emergencies beyond what we’ve saved for ourselves, or even asking for a month’s rent if we were to fall behind. we’ve always been our own plan b.

i’m going to figure it out like i did in 2019 when i left a job and turned down a massive severance agreement dangled in front of me but tied to an nda, and like i did in 2022 when i was laid off last time. i’ll figure it out because i have to. but god, i am so tired of figuring it out.