This is not a story about losing my job. It’s a story about what I found instead. But I do need to tell you the story of how I became unemployed for the second time in less than a year. A warning that the end of this post contains vast amounts of F-words. It couldn’t be avoided. Journalistic integrity oblige.
There is an acceptable grown-up version of why this job didn’t work out. When a future employer asks me why I was only in this job for 3 months, I will explain that my skills and expertise were not well-matched to the requirements of the job. I was hired as an internal communications agent expecting to be a content creator working with a team of communications professionals. Instead, I worked as a team of one in a job that required experience and agility in IT. Content was provided to me and my job was to publish and market it internally. Except that I have no experience in publishing and marketing, which should have been obvious reading my resume. They hired the wrong person for the job.
But the version of my dismissal that I am sharing with you today is the unofficial one. The one that took me down a deep dark well of self-doubt and crippling anxiety. The unofficial version for which there is no paper trail, but we all know to be true. You could say that my dismissal started on my first day of work when I looked out my office window and casually mentioned that I could see my partner’s office from here. « What does your partner do at City Hall? » my Director asked. « He’s a City Councillor » I answered. « Oh that’s nice » she said.
It wasn’t.
Soon after, I was accused of making a false declaration on my conflict of interest form by not disclosing my conjugal relationship with a member of Ottawa’s City Council. They also took me to task for giving my partner’s name as a work reference. I used to work for my partner, that’s how we met. He is my work reference. As someone who started to work at 45, I don’t have many work references. Still, they considered that it showed poor judgment on my part. The accusation of dishonesty and poor judgment were like a gut punch. I may have been mistaken in my understanding of “pecuniary interest* ” for the purpose of the conflict of interest declaration but not dishonest. From then on, it was like a slow descent into madness. To describe it bluntly, it was as if they knew they couldn’t fire me on account of who I was married to, so they made sure I would not succeed in the organization.
(* I wasn’t mistaken. I went to Law School for 8 years. I can read a contract.)
For the first two months, I was given no direction, no goals to reach, no tasks to perform, and no training or formation despite frequent requests. I only received feedback when I made a mistake and mistakes were frequent since I didn’t have the right skills and experience for the job.
When I was a kid, we had a cold storage room in the basement of our home in Old Chelsea. In the cold storage room, there was an open socket next to the light switch. One day, I was fumbling in the dark looking for the light when I stuck my finger in the socket. Getting feedback only when you make a mistake is like sticking your finger in a socket while looking for a light switch: now you’re scared and still in the dark.
After two months, I was a dysfunctional puddle of anxiety. At that point, my manager informed me that on account of performance issues, she would start giving me detailed directions as to what she expected from me. I bristled at the unfairness of — finally! — getting the guidance I needed but as the result of poor performance, which was the result of not getting any guidance. My director started doing the same thing. Almost overnight, I went from having no tasking or direction to receiving different tasks and directions from two different people: my boss and my boss’s boss, on top of the continual buzz of last-minute requests from within the organization. I soon started taking in water but I tried to keep up. I only sank further. I cried often, lost sleep, and became paralyzed by the fear of messing up. The more I curled up in a ball, the harder things got.
When I started on the job, I felt like I was vastly underemployed but confident that I had room to grow in the organization. Three months later, I felt too dumb to hold a job and I was crying every day, begging Glen, my mom, and my sister to give me permission to quit before it destroyed my mental health. Of course, no one in their right mind wanted to be the one allowing a divorced mother with 6 dependents to quit a job with pension and benefits.
On Easter weekend, Glen and I went to serve the Easter dinner at the Ottawa Mission. As we began serving meals, offering beverages and resetting the tables so more people could sit down and eat, I started feeling the same sense of place and belonging I felt the last time I was at the Mission. “I can do this” I thought. “I am a mother of 9 children. I can feed a lot of hungry people really efficiently. I am the mother of children who become oppositional and destructive at the drop of a hat. My trauma response is anticipating people’s needs, it’s to avert a crisis. That’s why I’m so good in a political environment.”
As I got in a zone, feeding, offering beverages, setting and resetting tables, giving people the grace of a word if they wanted to talk or silence if they didn’t, I felt my spirit reintegrate my body. I am capable. I am competent. I excel in politics because I can plug directly into what scares, concerns, and motivates people. I come alive in fast-paced environments but I am awful at planning and multi-tasking. I can do one thing at a time, but I can do it really well, especially in a moment of crisis. I can whack-a-mole like no one else, but only one mole at a time. I go deep. I go meaningful. I go with purpose. This is who I am. And who I am is awful at corporate communications, which is superficial and meant to convey as little meaning as possible. I decided to come back to the Mission every week to serve and remember what I’m good at.
On Tuesday April 18, I was busy working when a meeting with my director appeared on my calendar. It had no context or content and was titled « meeting » in low-caps. A meeting organized by someone who didn’t ask her assistant to plan this meeting. An assistant would know to give the attendee a head’s up about the last minute calendar entry. An assistant would title the meeting something different than “meeting”. An assistant would use proper capitalization. I knew.
My heart started racing, my palms started to sweat, my head was throbbing, my stomach was in my throat. I called Glen to tell him I was about to be fired, hoping he would tell me all the other reasons why I might be summoned to my boss’s boss’ office for a “meeting” with no other context or explanation. Glen was busy so I went down to a mezzanine overlooking the War Memorial and stared at the street until my nerves calmed down. Then I went back upstairs to get fired. It was 11:00 am.
I took the train back to Tunney’s Pasture. Made it to the bus station 5 minutes before the only bus that could take me home midday. This never happens unless you plan your trip. Usually the train arrives 5 minutes after the bus leaves. They don’t plan it this way, it just is. It felt like a wink from the universe, “let’s get Vero home, she’s had enough”.
I was waiting for my bus when a man walked past me grumbling and swearing. He looked like a man I could have served at the Mission on Easter weekend. He was grey-haired and clean-shaven but several razor cuts on his face and around his ears were still bleeding. His washed out clothes hung loosely on a thin frame. He looked at me and said angrily: “This place is fucking insane! You’re just walking with no idea where the fuck to go!” Relatable I thought. “Do you know where the bus to Westgate Mall stops?”
I wasn’t in the mood for it.
“I don’t know man. All I know is that the buses heading west come here at stops B and C.”
He looked at the stops. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Stittsville” I answered.
“Why *the fuck* would you be going there?? It’s in the butt fuck end of nowhere!” he exclaimed.
“Because I live there.”
Silence.
“Well then what the fuck are you doing *here*?” he asked.
“I went to work. Now I’m going home.” I was really trying to end the conversation. Unfazed he pressed:
“This morning?”
Silence. “You went to work downtown, from Stittsville, for two hours and now you’re going home?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” At this point, I asked him: “Do you want me to check where the bus to Westgate Mall stops?” He nodded and kept on: “Why did you go to work for two hours?”
“Listen. I went to work for the day. But I got fired 30 minutes ago. So now I’m going home.”
“You got fired??? They made you come all the way downtown just to FIRE YOU?!?”
“Yeah, I guess” I said. “The bus for Westgate Mall is coming in 5 minutes at stop D on the other side.”
“Aaah thank you!! So why did they fire you?”
Man. Do I have to answer this?
“It’s complicated. My manager didn’t like me. The reasons they gave me wouldn’t add up to a dismissal if they wanted to keep me.”
“Man or woman?”
“Woman”
“Black or white?” And then under his breath with a knowing glance: “I’m asking because — you know — it makes a difference.”
“White”. He nodded knowingly. “Older or younger than you?”
“About my age.” He pursed his lips and shook his head:
“Middle-aged white women. They are The Worst!” Now it was my turn to nod.
My bus pulled up. I said “that’s my bus and you’re about to miss yours.”
He sized me up one more time and said “Well… FUCK THEM!”
He started to walk away toward his stop still yelling: “FUCK THEM!! You won’t let them win. Go home and start looking for something better RIGHT NOW. Don’t waste a minute. And FUCK THEM!! They didn’t deserve you!”
I blew him a kiss as I waved down my bus driver and grabbed the daytime milk run back home. The bus driver smiled.
I looked out the bus window the whole ride home. I thought about the whacky conversation I just had at the bus stop. “If this were a movie – I thought – he would be Clarence, the angel who saves me from myself. If this were a movie, this would be a plot point.” I looked out the bus window at the grey skies and asked out loud: “What am I supposed to learn here?”
I rode the bus back home in silence, looking out the window the whole time. I felt calm and free, with eruptions of sheer terror when I remembered expensive medications, the root canal I had scheduled for the following week, the 6 kids’ dentals in May, and how I would keep the twins in horseback riding, which has been more therapeutic than anything else we tried or talked about trying by an order of magnitude. I canceled the cleaning service and my gym membership. I sent my resume to two speechwriting jobs on Linkedin and I wrote an email to my kids’ school asking them if they needed administrative or classroom support. They did.
Unemployment, Now what? I have some ideas. More to come in Part 2.
Sending love. And fuck em.