When this destruction happens enough times, what perishes is not you, but the ridiculous idea that any of this would conform to your napkin-sketch plans of the future. Your dreamed-of identity was a caricature. Your supposed path in life was a snare. All of your preconceptions were just a limitation you were placing on everything. And maybe there’s something grander than those preconceptions, it’s just a grandeur you wouldn’t have previously accepted as such.
This is the cessation of a certain mental function that most humans have by default: this constant looking away from what is towards some ideal, this constant imagining that our real lives are about to start, that we will escape this mess. I used to think this was helping, for some reason. Now I know it was all a bunch of cheap tinsel.
From Playing in the ruins
A couple good old-fashioned life updates this time around.
About 2 weeks ago, Kathy was laid off from her job. I won’t get into the details, as I don’t think it’s public, but suffice to say the issue was on the company’s side (they’re a small startup). Thankfully she was given a decent severance package, equivalent to what she would have gotten through the end of her upcoming maternity leave. But yeah. We are now two unemployed people that will be having a kid in three months! Definitely would not have predicted this being our situation 6 months ago. Life come at you fast.
Financially, we will be OK for quite a while – as Kathy was at a small startup, we had a pretty significant amount of cash set aside in case something like this happened, plus her severance pay is substantial. The main annoyance has been healthcare coverage (tying healthcare to employment might be the worst part of the American healthcare system). We qualify for Medi-Cal1 due to our now-very-low monthly income & due to generous rules for pregnant women, but the application processing time is lengthy, so we will likely be on COBRA for at least March. There was a bit of stress around if we would be able to get on COBRA the last few days, but it’s been resolved now.
Emotionally, we also feel… OK? Kathy was feeling a bit guilty about not being able to work as much lately due to the side effects of growing a child, and starting to get stressed about having to do work to cover for maternity leave. Now in a way she’s being forced to relax (not really, pregnancy is not relaxing) for the next 3 months at least. So far I’ve mostly been the one reaping the benefits, as she’s been using the time to cook and bake a lot, something she’s always wanted to do more of but didn’t feel she had time for.
For me, my initial reaction to the news was, oddly enough, excitement. Pretty strange; I wasn’t even really sure why. Still not totally sure, but I think I’m both excited to have someone else along for the ride of figuring out how to spend a large amount of open-ended time and also that we are essentially getting a full reset of our life. We’re about to experience one of the most significant events in our lives and neither of us have jobs, so we will get to really be there. I’m excited to see who we become.
Oh, also I turned 30 a few days ago. Poetically had some back pain the day of. Classic.
I don’t have any advice or lessons learned or anything. One thing I do know is that I am determined to make my 30s unimaginably better than my 20s, and that I’m off to a running start there with the upcoming birth of our child. I would really love your help, though – please answer the prompt below as a birthday present :D
If you were watching my life as a movie, what would you be yelling at the screen for me to do, stop doing, or see that I'm completely missing? What potential in me is going unfulfilled, or what pattern am I stuck in that I can't see? Please be brutally honest – this is anonymous, and I genuinely want to know what might transform my life in ways I can't recognize from the inside.
Side note, applying for Medi-Cal was not nearly as bad as I was expecting, the Covered California site is actually quite modern and nice!