Rest, reset, begin again
Hello, friends.
I'm writing this on Saturday, September 4. It is gorgeous here this morning. Big golden sun throwing spears through the windows. All the trees on fire in the sunrise. Mornings like this one, I really like living here.
I'm a bit too weary to appreciate it fully, though. As a result, this probably will be a fairly short newsletter. Why am I so tired? Two weeks ago, I learned that the startup for which I work was shutting down, and ever since, I've been in find-a-job mode, chasing leads and chatting with former colleagues and lining up interviews and talking to strangers about things like culture and remote-friendliness and work-life balance. Searching for a new job is an arduous process when you engage with it on your own terms; when it surprises you, when it's involuntary, it's all the more rapidly exhausting.
For the moment, while I navigate job listings and recruiter emails, my novel work is on hold. The project I'm ghostwriting is about to go out on proposal; The Dark Age is paused, practically mid-sentence. My inbox, usually a relatively calm place of notes to myself and emails from friends or readers, is right now a thicket of meeting invites and auto-replies and LinkedIn notifications and etc. I like email. It's my preferred way of engaging with most people on the planet. But right now I don't like opening my email app.
I've been mitgating the stress with afternoon naps, and binging low-stakes fiction about workplaces. (Which, I get it, might seem like the exact thing not to read during a job search...? I like workplace fiction, though.) Three books fit the bill this time:
Several People Are Typing, by Calvin Kasulke, is an new epistolary novel about an employee who inexplicably finds his consciousness transferred into his company's Slack workspace. The entire story is told through Slack transcripts. I'm a sucker for epistolary books. I think I read this one in two sittings.
Company, by Max Barry, is fifteen years old. In it, a new employee joins a sales team at a holdings company and learns that nobody can actually explain what the company does, or why it exists.
And You, by Austin Grossman, is about a game design company, and the new employee who, after initially thriving, tries to unravel the mystery behind a software glitch that might derail the company's next big game. I've read this one multiple times; I still haven't quite put my finger on why it pulls me back repeatedly.
I'm also reading a nonfiction book, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, by Claire Evans, about the women whose early programming work was not only the foundation for a computing revolution, but who broke ground for generations of women to build meaningful careers in tech.
Friday the 3rd was the final day of our startup; that is, it was the final day for the employees, and the service will fully shut down at the end of the month. At the close of the day, most of us gathered for a virtual happy hour, and raised our bourbons and beers and negronis to what we'd built, and to all the things we'd hoped to build, and to having worked together. I'd exited plenty of jobs before this one, but this was the first company where I felt actual sadness at how things were ending.
Now it's Monday, Labor Day. On Saturday, Felicia and Squish granted me all the space I needed to contend with my feelings. I spent a lot of the day in bed with those aforementioned books, or just sleeping. Sunday I did a bit of the same. For a moment, I preferred not to exist, not to be needed by anyone. I have a family who accepts me when I feel such things. I am grateful.
Things aren't bad, not by a longshot. Former colleagues have rallied to my side, making introductions to key people at their own companies; people from my distant past, when I wasn't a product designer but an agency creative director, have offered me homes in my former industry, working with familiar old faces. I've been chatting with new friends, who are doing work not terribly unlike what I've been doing for the past two years, and who would like me to join them. I have opportunities, and again, I'm grateful.
I've been working steadily since I was a teenager, though my days of earning money started earlier than that, with lawn mowers and leaf blowers. Now, with one job coming to an end, and another on the near horizon, I'm prioritizing a little rest for myself before I dive back in. I can't remember ever taking time off between jobs. That's not to say I haven't ever had downtime between two jobs, just that usually that downtime was spent frantically searching for the next thing. This time, if everything lines up, I'm going to take the rest of the month off. It'll cost me to do it, but I think making space to reset is more valuable than the cost. I'm very privileged to even be able to consider doing this.
I'm grateful.
During this month I hope for movie marathons and illustration projects with my daughter. For a date night with my wife. I hope to spend time working on my novel, and time taking care of myself. As many naps as I can manage.
And then, when October comes, I hope to begin a new job, whatever it might be, that's as fulfilling and rewarding as the one to which I've just said farewell. I'm optimistic and, yes, extremely thankful.
Hey, not such a short newsletter after all. I'll be back next week with another Dark Age newsletter. (If you haven't signed up for those, and you're interested in the book I'm writing, here's how to do it!)
See you next week!
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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