The first time I was laid off, I was 21 years old. A year out of college, I’d been working as a health educator at a student health center. To be perfectly honest, I hated my job. I was poorly paid and overwhelmed with responsibility. Worst of all, I despised my boss. It was the kind of work environment where getting up in the morning is physically painful, and most of your free time is spent quietly crying in the bathroom.
And yet as miserable as the job made me, being called into my boss’s office to be told my contract would not be renewed felt even worse. Having an awful job was bad enough, but failing at it? As an Ivy League graduate who’d always breezed through school, failure was an unfamiliar sensation. And an unwelcome one. Unprepared for a moment like, all I knew for sure was that it felt awful.
After I got the news, I wandered the school’s beautiful campus, bawling my way through my cell’s contact list. I’m sure I phoned quite a number of people that afternoon, but the only conversation I remember was the one I had with my father.
“Why are you crying?” he asked me. “You hated that job.”
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