On August 28th, my wife lost her job. 24 hours later, I lost mine. This blog is a continuation of the day-by-day chronicling of our emotional journey back to employment. This is bound to be upsetting, hilarious and hopeful.
Tuesday – October 15, 2014
After the whiplash day yesterday, Erin and I were determined to get to the local Temple. This is our most sacred building, where we serve those who have gone on before us and where we are most likely to receive answers to the questions that trouble us. I’ve made more than one life-altering decision while attending the Temple because the spirit that exists there opens the way for such revelation.
After dropping the kids off at school, we sped across town dressed in our Sunday Best and spent the next 3 1/2 hours serving and praying. The serving part was great. The praying part proved to be fruitless. We gained no clarity on our situations and remain as confused about next steps as ever. This is not discouraging, but it is frustrating. We long for answers, but do not doubt they will come. I’m grateful to be as old as I am and have so much benefit from past experiences. I might have freaked way out a decade or two ago, wondering if I’d ever get an answer at all. Now I know to just be patient. We have plans to go back to the Temple at our earliest convenience.
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Today, we got an email we’d been waiting a while for. The organization Erin auditioned for in San Francisco finally got back to her… only to say she did not get the job. Erin spent the rest of the day severely bummed out. Not because she thought she really had a shot*, but because this was her dream job. However ill a fit she was on paper, this was the job so much a dream she didn’t even imagine it could actually exist.
*She felt like she gave a good audition and had exactly the skills they were looking for, but she wouldn’t have hired her either if she were them. Who would hire someone who lives three hours away and may or may not be available depending on where her husband ended up? It was only a part-time position to start and she would have needed them to make some accommodations for her to make it all work. They knew all of this.
I told her to post the rejection on Facebook to get some immediate affirmations (mine weren’t cutting it). Say what you will about fights and drama and the misuse of Facebook*, when it comes to supporting a person when they’re down, there’s no better or quicker place to turn. People dutifully told her how great she is, which was both true and what she needed. Cody and Kristen (she of the dropping of the R Bombs) even came over with sorrow-drowning ice cream.
*Please, spare me the details of how hard it was for you to get the lid off the peanut butter jar. You didn’t conquer Everest and I refuse to congratulate you like you did. Also: I don’t care.
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I capped off the day in much the same way it started–by serving others. In this case, I helped my friend Donna start her own blog so she can chronicle her upcoming adventures fighting Ebola in Africa.
Holy crud, right?
Despite evidence to the contrary, I’m generally reluctant to say “Hey, today I helped this person! Today I served this group!” I mean, besides the fact that it’s not like I’m FIGHTING EBOLA IN AFRICA (I mean, I’m not crazy), I believe boasting about such things is detrimental to the doing of them. There’s only one decent reason to even mention it to you here, in this blog. And that’s to illustrate this point:
I find that the only true way to ward off self-pity and despondence is in the giving of a helping hand here and there. I love writing and I like drawing and I appreciate the freelance work that’s increasingly being thrown my way, but the most satisfying work I do these days comes when I am allowed the privilege of helping someone out. I feel like I have purpose beyond my troubles and whatever results from them, and I like seeing people smile. That’s stupidly cliche, I know, but I’m telling you when the job is taken away–the thing you spend most of your waking hours doing–it’s a bit like dying. You see more clearly what’s of the most worth. Smiles are worth a lot. They won’t pay the mortgage, but they’re still better than cash.
If one of the big questions we were asked at the end of our lives to give an accounting of what we were up to on this Earth was something simple like “On the whole, did you make people’s days better or worse?” I think that would be fair. I would expect a question like that. No one is going to ask me about how successful my marketing plan was or whether that logo was really the best choice. They’re going to want to know if I contributed to the world’s darkness or fought against it.
Jobs aren’t bad things–they’re very good things–but anything we do mostly out of a need for survival can distract us from the stuff that matters a great deal more. Survival-based activities can start to seem like the only important activities. When that happens then we’re no better than every dad in the 1st act of every 80’s kids movie ever–overworked, neglectful of the truly most needful things, and unhappy.
All of which is to say: I’m unemployed and I’m yet I am happy.
Brock Heasley 