For the past six months, I’ve been working around the clock. Working at an event rental company means weddings, weddings, weddings. Of course, there are corporate events and the occasional rich kid’s birthday party we decorate, but mainly, we cater to brides. The summertime wedding season is our time to shine.
As summer morphed into fall, I began fantasizing about the upcoming layoff in what I thought would be January. My shoulder has had this constant burn and ache due to all the heavy lifting I’ve been doing at work lately. Since September, we have been working with a skeleton crew because most of our employees return to school in the fall. My work wife, Susie, and I had been loading trucks and counting drop-offs all on our own.
I knew the layoff was coming. They do every year. I just didn’t expect it to happen so fast.
“Wait, aren’t you the manager now? How did you get laid off?” Sophie asked when I told my family at dinner that I had been made redundant.
It was a fair question. I, too, thought my middle management status would inoculate me from any of the early layoffs. Unfortunately, no. The business didn’t have the cash flow in these slow months to support hourly wage earners.
I tried to look at the bright side. For the past six months, I’ve done little to no writing. I somehow managed to get the edits done on I’m Not the Manager Here, but I haven’t even thought about how I would begin marketing the book and selling it. I have yet to even write a blurb for the thing.
Sure, I’d only be making 55% of my regular earnings now that I was on unemployment insurance, and that was going to be tricky to live off since I have grown accustomed to midday lattes and stone-fired pizza every Friday night but think of all the writing I could get done!
Monday morning, my boss, David, told Susie and me about the layoffs. He explained that he only had enough hours to give us one day a week, so we might as well take the discharge as we’d be making more money on E.I. than at work.
I woke up the next day officially unemployed.
As I drank (boring regular) coffee, I contemplated the fix I was in. I needed to get back that incredible feeling of being a starving artist.
Before getting the manager position at the warehouse, I knew it well. I’d hustle and scheme in my writing career on a daily basis. I sweat for my craft, and I loved it. Over the past few months, I’d become soft and complacent regarding the hard work of writing.
I had a sweet warehouse gig to fall back on financially, so who cared if I didn’t write this week or, er, month.
With my coffee mug in hand, I stood in the doorway of my spare room, which once upon a time doubled as my office. I needed to feel like a writer again.
“This place needs to become my study,” I said the word study with the haughty air of somebody who was not about to start living off a wage well below the poverty line.
My son Lars looked at me sadly and said, “Mom, people like us don’t have studies. We have spare rooms that double as a bedroom for our spoiled dog.”
Regardless of my family’s naysayery, I spent the next five hours moving all the random bookshelves I had scattered throughout my house into my new “study” and placing my beloved books ever so strategically on their shelves.
After I was done, I looked at my computer, contemplated writing something and then went grocery shopping even though we didn’t need any groceries. When I got home, I took heed of my laptop sitting alone on my desk in the study, turned on my heel and avoided that room with a stubbornness that would make a mule jealous.
I downloaded “Doppelganger” by Naomi Klien and then took the dog for a two-hour walk because the book is so good that I didn’t want to stop listening. 10 out of 10 would recommend.
I watered my plants and deadheaded their leaves. I watched Solar Opposites on Disney+. I did some Facebook scheduling of Substack articles I wrote years ago and have never shared on social media.
And then, I did yoga for 30 minutes because I felt anxious about something.
I couldn’t pinpoint where the worry was coming from until I ventured past my office and again saw my computer’s black screen staring back at me. Taunting me from my desk, whispering, then screaming, “You’re avoiding me because you know you’re a failure. You’re never going to make this happen. You’re going to spend this time off twiddling your thumbs and looking at pictures of shirtless men on Instagram because you’re a pervert like that!”
It was true. It was all true.
The utter lack of faith I had in myself was daunting. I hadn’t written anything good for months. I wasn’t even laughing at my own stuff, which is always a bad sign. How was I going to build back this writing career I had let slip away in six short months of warehouse managing?
The truth is, I have forgotten how to be a writer.
The long hours of bossing subordinates around in a business-type setting had left me insecure about slinging sentences.
A few years ago, I would have called writing my main gig and the laundry position I held at the time a side hustle for a bit of extra cash. But do you know what’s a lot easier than building up a writing career?
Working up the small business corporate ladder for the spoils of a half-decent wage.
If there is one thing I know how to do, it’s manual labour in exchange for money. I’ve been dancing this jig my entire life. I wrote a book about the beauty of minimum-wage paying jobs. I am not one to toot the horns I proudly carry on my sturdy back, but I am good at being an employee.
I have superb work ethic. I take orders easily and willingly, and I’m happy to do the tasks that will gimme that green at the end of a pay period.
Being a wage slave is much easier than working against a constantly changing algorithm to gain notoriety in an already saturated market. Plus, I got so many more props and encouragement when it came to my 9–5 job than I ever did writing online.
Even if most of the time, those props were just Susie and me standing on either end of an industrial pressing iron telling each other how amazing we were to have gotten all this laundry pressed and processed.
As I finally sit down in front of my computer, I possess zero confidence as I embark on a quest to become a writer again. I don’t know where to start because I no longer know who I am.
Am I a manager? My soon-to-be debut book may disagree, but in my heart, I still am. Am I a blogger, a baker, a candlestick maker? Well no. The last time I made candles was in 2011 when I went through that beeswax-collecting stage.
The tangibility of having an out-of-the-house job was something I took for granted. A place to go every day and feel the importance of my efforts leak out onto a bleachy-smelling warehouse floor.
Now, there is no warehouse floor, just an empty word processing page, a book-filled study, and a vague hope that one day soon, I’ll remember my writing roots.
I haven't had a day job since 2019, but I still experience the same lack of confidence in my writing when I wake up every morning.