I was laid off a year ago today. I don’t know what I’m supposed to call today. Is it a “Laid-off-iversary?” “Anti-versary?” “Professional Severance Day?” “Goodbye, Good Luck, and Good Riddance Day?”
In any case, I (along with 400+ other employees at Hallmark) was laid off on February 17th last year. I don’t know if I really have anything profound to say about it a year later, but I do have some thoughts about what it means.
I’ve bought exactly two greeting cards in the last year, and I bought them both at Target (where Hallmark cards are not sold). I know that act is probably more passive aggressive than productive. My individual purchasing choices likely don’t make much of an impact. But after having been a loyal and vocal brand advocate (and employee and customer) for eight years, walking away from the product category felt like it was probably the right thing to do. It was a response I had control of, and I took some small satisfaction from it.
I will probably buy and give greeting cards again at some point. I do believe that the act of sending and receiving cards is a meaningful one. But if I buy them again, it will be from my current company. Brand loyalty goes only so far as it's returned. I’ll probably still buy a few Keepsake ornaments every year, though. I’m a collector at heart, and I can’t bring myself to stop the 12 Days of Christmas series now or pass on a Hall of Justice ornament.
I knew this would be the case a year ago, but what I’ve missed most about my former workplace are the people I met and worked with there. Recently I read an excellent Atlantic article titled “The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship.” The premise is that we all maintain a lot of loose friendships and relationships in our lives – what the author of the piece, Amanda Mull, calls “weak ties.” These ties aren’t strong, unbreakable relationships (or often even true friendships), but they are social connections that invigorate us and keep us connected to a larger social fabric. Mull says that one of our biggest losses in the pandemic year is this loose social fabric.
I had already started feeling that loss a month before everything got locked down last March. When you leave an office environment, you lose a community. You don’t see familiar people in the hallways…or the friends down the hall…or the friendly ladies in the card shop or cafeteria who know you by name and ask you about your family. All of that just stops, and it’s not like it’ll ever resume in a professional space – at least with that set of people. After nearly eight years at a large company, that community of connections (both good friends and weak ties) is pretty large. Its loss hurts. Facebook, it turns out, is a poor substitute for seeing actual faces and hearing voices. I miss these people, and I’ll continue to miss them even after the pandemic is over and we go back to some semblance of social normalcy.
A year ago today, I was working under a leadership structure that micromanaged and constantly questioned my creative choices and instincts. It wasn’t just me, though. This was the case for most of my editorial and design colleagues. We were constantly asked to try new and different things, but most of the life and energy of these new things were drained and suffocated by a committee of people who didn’t trust the people they had hired, didn’t really know what they were looking for, and didn’t understand ideas that seemed new or unfamiliar. It was a constant fight, and it was damaging both to morale and to sales results season after season.
Now I’m working for leadership that trusts and empowers my abilities, and it’s made an enormous difference – both in my work and in the economic results of that work. I’ve done some of the best writing of my professional career in the last six months. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re given trust and creative freedom. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you’re being held back until you’re free to try something new.
I’m enormously lucky in how things worked out. I was released a few weeks before a pandemic completely rewrote our national professional and social narrative. I had an economic parachute (both through my severance package and through the government’s CARES Act) that allowed me to figure things out, explore options, write for myself, and reset. I had a small group of loving, encouraging friends/family/neighbors who lifted me up and kept me afloat when I was feeling low. I landed a great job as summer was winding down, and I’ve enjoyed that despite the professional constraints that COVID is still causing.
So yes, I’m incredibly fortunate. But I haven’t forgotten what today felt like a year ago. When you get that email from HR, it’s like a train barreling right into your chest. It traumatizes you and changes you. It's a monumental life disruption. It makes you sad and bitter and angry and panicked. These feelings are tempered over time, but they still linger.
As the snow falls outside this morning, the range of emotions I feel is thankfully much more balanced than it was last year. There’s hope now, even in the frozen paralysis of another snow day spent inside during a pandemic year. The blanket of fresh snow is clean and white – a blank slate that lies still and keeps things quiet for a short while. There’s music and warmth inside to keep things comfortable. In time, the new snow will melt away and things will start moving again. But it’s appropriate that today is a time for stillness and reflection. No matter how joyful or how hellish, some days deserve to be remembered.
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