Lived Through This
I’ve Lost My Livelihood Before, and This Is What I Learned
Reflections on the last time my life went silent
Yesterday, I filed an unemployment claim for the second time in my just-under-a-decade-old career. When I did so for the first time five years ago, I had the privilege of not even knowing there was such a process. This time around, I knew the ropes. There is some strange comfort in that.
As the last few weeks of collective panic and upheaval have unfolded, I’ve also had the strange and comforting feeling of having been through this before. In August 2015, I watched the first company I ever loved collapse overnight. In the blink of a very intense weekend, I was immediately isolated from the work, the people, the safety, and the only existence I’d ever known professionally.
It was a microcosm of our current reality. What happened then is happening again today, with grave implications for the home and humanity we all share. And strangely, that experience has, for me, made the current unprecedented disaster feel, in some ways, precedented.
I remember each stage of the process from last time around: the initial shock that things were really about to change; the last-ditch hustle to do everything possible to fend off complete disaster; the…
