smaller and tighter, or the big-ticket items will not happen.
From the other Life Coach: Write yourself a check for a million dollars and look at it every day. Eventually, you’ll be successful and rich, and able to cash that check. (Still waiting.)
From the Rainbow Healer: You work too hard and nothing is ever good enough because you want to be liked because you must have been traumatized as a child. (I was not.)
From the Acupuncturist: You keep weight on to make yourself larger to keep people away—to literally create more space between them and you. (I’m a New Yorker. I like my space.)
From the Alternative Medicine Practitioner: If you sleep with a $150 magnet on your foot (magnetic therapy) when you have an injury, it will heal you. Unless, well, it won’t. Especially if what you really need is foot surgery to remove a three-inch piece of wood from your foot. Like I did. (True story.)
From the Spa: Squat bare-assed over burning incense at a high-end hotel. (I’m not sure what that was supposed to do, but it was expensive, so I assumed it couldn’t be bad.)
From Everybody Every Day: Beware of Mercury in retrograde. Don’t sign contracts during this time. (And, uh, trust me, your lawyer and your clients won’t think you’re nuts when you delay executing a deal for a week. Or at least they won’t tell you.)
From a Clairvoyant: Smudge your house with smoldering dry sage to get the bad juju out. (Feels like you’re doing something even if you’re not.)
From a Supermodel: Be sure to keep a cactus, and if it dies figure out who was at your house, because someone bad killed it by being there. (I did that. And a cactus died once. So, I moved. Not 100 percent because of the dead cactus, but I couldn’t remember who had killed it and I hadn’t yet learned how to smudge the place.)
From a Book: Dyeing a red streak in your hair will lead to personal and creative achievement, like The Artist’s Way said it would. (It said to do something wild that you wouldn’t normally do, and for me, wild meant a red streak.)
From Marie Kondo: Throw out all clothing that doesn’t spark joy. (This will mostly leave you with nothing to wear.)
From the Feng Shui Police: Put flowers to the right side of your desk if you want to find love. Put something green to the left so that you’ll get rich. Put reminders of your accomplishments in the center to ensure that you accomplish more. (Still waiting on said promised results.)
From a Random Magazine: Write negative things down on slips of paper and put them in the freezer every year to clear them away. (Or end up with a freezer full of stickies.)
On the other side of the Great Recession of 2008, there were those stories of the people who prevailed and happily came up with a second act, built million-dollar businesses, and overcame the big layoff during what felt like the end of days. There was also the flip side of that coin: the heartbreakers about the people who never recovered, who lost their homes and livelihoods, and experienced insurmountable declines in health.
My layoff wasn’t like any of these. It wasn’t as dramatic, or nearly as dire. I had enough friends and family in my life to know I’d never be homeless or hungry. They were all incredibly generous, keeping the wine flowing and, in my mom’s case, the health-care premium paid for. But it still stung.
And, unlike the fog Valium gives you the day after you take it, the burden and anxiety of my layoff never, ever left me. I don’t wish job loss on anybody. Even as a layoff based on the economy and not my performance, it felt deeply upsetting and utterly personal. Not to mention painfully embarrassing.
This book certainly isn’t another the-recession-hit-then-I-found-a-job story. I don’t want to dwell on the job loss here, but it was, as they say in the movies, the inciting incident. And while it consumed me for a long time, I finally realized, it’s not the story, just a tiny part of this one.
Still, here’s the way it played out…
survival
In mid-September 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and things were looking bleak across the country. That was putting it mildly. We were staring into a global economic abyss. At the time, I was producing a television show for BusinessWeek magazine called BusinessWeekTV. It was a financial news show produced on the forty-ninth floor of the McGraw-Hill building, so we were keenly aware of what was happening, economically speaking.
Right around that time, my friend and colleague Wendy and I were running out to grab lunch. As we waited for the elevator, we ran into Jack, the guy who did the budgets. Jack being a usually chatty and friendly person, we asked how he was, and he explained that he was frazzled because it was budget time and he was working long days.
Friendly and amusing as always, Wendy said to him, “Make sure you leave enough for us in TV.”
If there was an Academy Award for Best Worst Poker Face, Jack would have won it. He froze. His smile vanished and his face went white. Then he practically dove headfirst into the elevator without saying a word.
Wendy and I looked at each other after he left and noisily burst out laughing. “Well, that was awkward,” she said. We thought perhaps there would be some belt-tightening—no more holiday dinners at Bobby Van’s. Maybe due to lack of imagination, or over-confidence, or just plain naiveté, we had no idea what we were in for.
We should have known better.
Still, I didn’t think too much of Jack in the elevator. Later, I was meeting some friends for dinner at Otto off Fifth Avenue, and I had some time to kill. As usual, I was ultra-early, so I sat on a bench and stared at the fountain in that little triangle park where Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue intersect.
I had a bad feeling that I couldn’t shake, so I called the anchor of our show as I sat there soaking in the last licks of September sunshine.
“Do you think we will lose our jobs?”
She insisted we had nothing to worry about because we were making money for the company. Still, deep in my gut, I felt a shift on the horizon.
And, of course, there was the Jack incident, this probably marked the last time for a long time that I would trust my gut.
When in Doubt, Buy a Bad-Ass Handbag
Anticipating that I might never again earn a proper living, I did what everyone should never do when facing unemployment and financial collapse. I got up from my seat in that park and walked, with urgency, to Marc by Marc Jacobs and bought a show-stopping five-hundred-dollar purple leather bag.
It was a floppy, large, chunky-hardware, hobo-type bag with lots of outside pockets (a subway rider’s dream). For years, I’d been contemplating what life would be like if I owned that bag or one like it, but up until then I’d never spent five hundred dollars on any single clothing item or accessory. It was an insane purchase, but I felt strongly it was the last expensive purse I’d ever be able to afford. I joked later that night with my friends that if I did get laid off, I would live in the handbag.
I had been right to worry.
A week later, I was late to work. Very late, for some reason I can’t remember. At ten fifteen, I got a call from my boss asking where I was. I said I was on my way in a cab. He’d never called before.
“Hurry up and get here,” he said. “We’re all assembled in the conference room.”
“Are we being laid off?” I asked. Somehow I knew.
“I can’t say,” he said.
“So, yes,” I said.
I was late for my layoff.
Everyone