The Bumpy Beginnings of Liberty

It's my first day out of the company where I didn't meet up with any colleagues.

It was rough. I woke up before 8 a.m., a usually unheard-of early time, then went back to sleep for an hour or so between 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., and have still been stress-sleeping (i.e. thinking about work while sleeping). After waking up I was thinking with tired pain about all the errands that need doing (contacting university professors, registering as a job seeker, getting a Covid test ahead of the evening choir...) and worrying that I wouldn't be able to do anything ever again now that I don't have the impetus of all the tasks that happen in the course of a working day.

On the one hand, explicitly giving up the responsibility I felt toward a hundred-odd colleagues, of whom most have become deeply unhappy so that lifting spirits has become harder and harder, is such a relief that I feel absolutely giddy with it, like Atlas transferring the world to Hercules' shoulders. In the past weeks it became especially heavy as I've been playing a sort of 5-dimensional chess in which I tried to guess at how to leave without causing colleagues to panic, gave little lifts to morale here and there (through focusing on colleagues individually and personally and giving specific and well-deserved praise), and squelched all of my own feelings of frustration, anger and overwhelm to be as constructive as possible. While not being able to sleep very well or eat very well. On the other hand, doing things for others is a much stronger motivation in life than just focusing willpower and ingenuity on my own ends, which is like crushing a peanut with a sledgehammer.

I mean no disparagement of the company, but I've been deeply torn for months between loyalty to a company that also made me sign a non-disclosure agreement, alongside the abstract ethics of being an employee — and my absolute fury at the emotional toll that company changes have taken on colleagues, and fear for their psychological and emotional health. Especially with my own team, I turned into a regular 'momma bear' during my last days and felt like I would happily beat anyone up who made them unhappy. I didn't know whether telling people that I appreciated their work and pointing out why, would encourage them to stay longer than they'd otherwise have done because they'd finally feel that someone is acknowledging their effort... but that later they'd regret not leaving earlier, for example. It definitely might save the company's bacon for a while, but it would not save theirs. Anyway, in the end I haven't encouraged anyone to leave (just encouraged one person to leave sooner, or take sick days, if things turn nasty — which might admittedly be skirting the law). But I have given whichever information they asked for about how to leave.

That said, these past weeks my youngest brothers and mother have been magnificent, my aunt L. wrote a nice note to cheer me up, many teammates including uncle M. have been lovely, my coach/therapist also lent her sympathetic ear, and former colleagues have sent messages of support. So it's never just me propping up others.

In the meantime I've been pursuing my amateur journalism with more zeal and vigour than discretion. After jamming a firewire plug into my desktop computer to try to transfer photographs from my smartphone, it looks like my ethernet socket is broken. And I was almost as frustrated as my dad became when things didn't go well on his computer, when trying to set up a Wordpress account so that e.g. editors could check my bona fides. I researched the websites of photojournalists like Lynsey Addario and wanted something close to what they had: a simple sidebar listing perhaps 5 sub-pages, a very pared-down look, a few attractive images. No dice. It's also embarrassing that I couldn't link to a single published article, blog post, ... under my own name.

What I've realized is that when it comes to starting a job, I have very little to no self-esteem. I just don't believe I can do that task or job unless someone else tells me so, and it's making me very scared about finding the next thing. This is definitely sad for a thirty-seven-year -old adult. Even no longer feeling that I'm leading a team has dinged my self-confidence to the degree that I feel comparatively mopey and inept when running errands, like shopping; of course that makes no logical sense whatsoever.

Anyway, I went to choir practice this evening. The school where we practice was closed down for the Easter holidays, so it was pitch-dark again as we left; and yet again I stepped down four-odd flights of stairs feeling that the spirits of generations of pupils and teachers were waiting to pounce at me from the shadows. That said, I passed a church spire on the way home: the gentle lighting of the façade, the oblique glow from the nearby apartment windows, the first golden sprigs of blossoms on a tree, the outline of the branches of another tree, the whimsical clouds, and the pale moon, were all very poetic and reminiscent of late 19th-century German paintings.