unemployed

Got up at 9 today. I decided this morning to be a little bit nicer to myself than usual when I get up at 9am on a Tuesday. I consensually laid myself off from my hotel job back at the end of April. It was a combination of things, but it mainly boiled down to the lack of respect I had for the company that I worked for.

I’d stayed with them after a terrible incident with the owner of the company when I fell for a phishing scam while working at the corporate office. This is back in 2018. I lost the company $3000. The HR person didn’t schedule a meeting with the CEO until a couple of weeks after. She didn’t tell the (known to be difficult) CEO until he was walking down the stairs to meet me. He came barging into the HR office screaming at me calling me “stupid.” My boss, the VP of Operations, came into the office to defend me. He literally pushed the CEO with his arms to make him stop yelling. It was bad.

So… after that I end up not working for the corporate office, but going back to the hotel I used to work at (which I liked way better anyways.) Come Coronavirus season, it’s just me and my General Manager at the hotel working crazy hours.

It gets to be too much, too much at risk for a company that has shown me too little.

My GM and I are cool, so we laid me off, temporarily. The time came for me to come back, but I still felt this lack of respect boiling in my blood. I finally said goodbye to the company last month.

That’s how I got here. Unemployed. Waking up at 9am on Tuesdays. I’m not mad today though. I’m not mad about how anything went. I’m not mad about sleeping in. I’m glad I slept in. I’m glad after working the past five years usually starting from anywhere from 5am -7am in the morning, five days a week, that I can gracefully wake up at 9am and it be okay.

Before today, each weekday that I didn’t wake up with a heavy agenda and to-do list, I’d be upset with myself a little. I would feel that I let myself down for that day. Here I am with all this valuable time! Why wasn’t I finishing my book? Why hadn’t I organized everything? Why? Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a pandemic, what will I do? Time after all is truly the most valuable resource, is it not?

Only today, when I let myself sleep, let myself be, did I feel differently.

Last Friday, my mom’s hair dresser (who I love) came to her house in Orange County to do all of our hair(s). We talked about unemployment, feeling like we don’t wake up early enough, coronavirus talk, you know, the usual… She said something that made me think though. She said, “It’s okay to have those lazy days if you just let them happen, then the next day maybe you’ll feel good again.” I’ve heard this before, maybe even said it, but for some reason, I heard her, I really heard her.

I was in an especially shitty mood last Friday too, but because I actually heard her, I listened to it. We talked about how the Coronavirus has made everyone stop and reevaluate their lives. It has put a lot of people out of work. She said, “Maybe now everyone can see that not everything is just about work.” This resonated too. Damn. In L.A., in America, the value of our society is often placed on the job we have or the amount of money that we make.

What if the Coronavirus is just the pause that the busy human race needed? Success equals a lot of money? Right? What if that isn’t right? What if the real currency (or success) is time? What if time is what makes life valuable? Time to do what we love or spend it with whom we love. This is hard for me because too much time means too much thinking, too much evaluating, too much feeling. Is that that bad though?

To Americans especially, what if this is a pause for us to examine our lives? Reevaluate the way we spend our time. What if it is a pause for us to not work so much? What if it is a pause for us to just breathe? What if we needed the pause? What if it is a pause for us to sleep in on Tuesdays and watch some random show for hours and be OK with that? Be OK with just being.

We all move so fast. We go so fast. We want everything now. God knows, I do. What if this is just the pause I needed so that I can come back stronger than ever?

I may meditate and all that, but am I really able to just let myself be in the nothingness or in the uncertainty? Am I? Some days, no. Today, yes. I do know I feel lucky to have someone to live with too. We make each other crazy more often than not, but we are here for each other nonetheless.

There’s a quote that comes up in my meditation app that says:

“The pause is just as important as the note.”

Maybe this is our global pause in the song of our lives. Let’s use it well.

SIDE NOTE: I write this as someone who (me or my family) has not been directly affected health wise by the Coronavirus, and I pray for anyone who has.