Cornered, Cut and Rolled

The most surprising thing about my first week of unemployment was just how busy it ended up being.

I don’t want to give the impression that I was rushed off my feet the entire week, without any chance to sit down and relax, because that’s obviously not true; I spent more than my fair share of time in front of the television, enjoying the cinematic fruits of many people’s labor including some genuinely terrible, yet utterly enjoyable, movies. (The Meg, I’m looking at you pretty directly.) There was a lot of downtime, and it was particularly enjoyable; I can’t and wouldn’t claim otherwise.

Despite all that, though, there were things that I’d fully intended to do with that week that just… didn’t get done. And not for lack of trying, either; I would start days with an internal checklist of things to accomplish, with specific items on the list, and they would somehow still be on that list by the end of the day, and I wouldn’t really have any excuse for that other that, “somehow, things got in the way…?” What those things happened to be, however, felt as mysterious to me as to everyone else. Nature abhors a vacuum, and somehow, my days became filled by whatever it was possible to be filled by.

Some of this was filled by work stuff, or at least work-related stuff; I did an edit test for a gig I didn’t get, I sent a lot of emails, I made some phone calls and tried to set up future things that may or may not happen. I also found out about things that wouldn’t happen, or found out news about the landscape out there that made my plans feel that little bit less possible, and I feel as if those were the things that filled my week the most — the emotional labor of having to reassess things and deal with the bad news aspect of it all.

This might be the thing I wasn’t expecting, but will have to deal with the most over the next few weeks: having to deal with things not working out and having to come up with Plans B, C, D, and however far in the alphabet I have to go before something sticks. The perils of a previously charmed life, I guess.

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