Phil's Superpower of Enthusiasm

In February, after three reorganizations in six months, the Gates Foundation eliminated my work group and laid me and my colleagues off. For me, it was more unexpected with regards to the timing, rather than the fact of the lay off itself. After the last couple of reorganizations, I more or less figured the writing was on the wall. I just expected it to happen this summer, rather than this winter. When I walked into a meeting in late February, I didn’t think that would be the day until my boss’s boss told me to hold on a minute because someone else was joining us. I figured she was a new team member (the group had been expanding, after all) right up until she introduced herself as being from HR. Good times.

Even though I’d been half-expecting it, oh man did it hurt.

I loved that job. It changed my life in a lot of profound ways, both large and small. It was, far and away, the most welcoming and supportive group of colleagues I’ve ever known, and it got me out of a situation that was slowly killing me, literally. It was a mission that mattered to me, deeply,¹ and it was work that I was GOOD at, and enjoyed. Kristi jokes that maybe some day she’ll understand what I actually do for a living, but as another friend pointed out this weekend, I really like helping people. At the Foundation, I had no difficulty understanding the ways in which my work helped make the world a less awful place.

The timing also particularly sucked. As anyone who is paying attention knows, this is a shitty job market for attorneys, particularly those who are publicly minded.² I feel pretty comfortable saying that this is, in fact, the worst job market for people like me in my lifetime, and I graduated from law school at the nadir of the Great Recession. At least in the Great Recession, government was hiring. At this point, the federal government is shedding thousands of lawyers,³ the economy is increasingly shaky so the private sector is leery of hiring, and state government is bracing for a commensurate dip in revenues. Non-profits have similar concerns, in light of a federal government that is blindly cutting programs without even a hint of consideration of the consequences, so the end result is that not a lot of people are hiring folks like me.

It’s pretty intuitive that getting laid off would hurt. I’ve spent a lot of the last few years working hard to try to decouple my sense of self from my work, after most of a career spent working for state government where those things blended together way too much to be healthy. I’ve also been working pretty hard on myself, with particular emphasis on my physical health. I’ve lost almost 100 pounds, gotten my blood chemistry (particularly blood sugar!) under control, gotten consistent sleep, better exercise, got out hiking again, and even started a pretty serious power-lifting program. I am better, in virtually every way, at 43 than I was at 42 or 41, and certainly than I was in my mid- to late-30s. My life is almost certainly going to be much longer than it would have been if I didn’t make those changes. And then, this fall, feeling better about myself and with more emotional and mental bandwidth than I have had as an adult, I met a wonderful woman and her lovely cats, and I’m happier and more fulfilled than I can ever remember being.⁴

Getting laid off? It threatened all of those things. It hit at the core of me, of who I am, of who I want to be. On a purely practical level, a lot of what I’ve accomplished was the result of things that flowed from my job at the Foundation: access to great, life-altering medication, a support structure including a personal coach, personal training, and a nutritionist, all of whom talk to each other, and a variety of other resources (and a job with a work/life balance that actually gave me time and mental bandwidth to get healthier).

Being laid off also, for the first time in my adult life, really fucked with my brain chemistry. I’ve always been very fortunate, in that even when I have been angry or grumpy or sleep deprived, I’ve mostly not been depressed. Some of you might be surprised to hear this, but I think at heart I’m a genuinely optimistic person most of the time. And getting laid off really threatened that too.

I threw myself into the mission of finding a job. I wrote two pages of “Funemployment Principles,” to-do lists, project lists for my house in the event that I needed to sell, and long-term goals that I wanted to make meaningful progress on. I made ambitions plans to exercise every day, to accelerate my Spanish learning, to teach myself to do 3D modeling, and to really master woodworking. And in the end … I did some of it. I didn’t get my custom desktop built, but … well, it’s weirdly hard to get anyone to sell you a live-edge slab in Olympia, apparently. I haven’t done my drywall repairs, but honestly that’s a crappy task to try to do when you can’t have the doors and windows open for dust control, so that’s probably better left for this summer anyway.

I did work hard to see the people I love, rather than retreating into myself and going back to early-pandemic-level hermiting. I’m pretty proud of the headphones stands I designed and built (all seven rounds of them), and I made a big dent on my backlog of the reviews I wanted to get done for my blog (something I genuinely enjoy doing). I spent a lot of time at the gym, and got substantially stronger over the three months from February through April. I mostly kept meeting with my personal coach, and making weekly menus, and intermittent fasting, and I applied for jobs every week. I didn’t do much retail therapy (though I know why someone looking at my reviews might think otherwise). I took my girlfriend to Disneyland, a MUCH needed respite and the single brightest thing about this year so far. I discovered Dole Whip. I cleaned out my basement, built a desk riser and rewired my desk at least three times, fully designed (in 3D!) my dream desk, and joined the OlyMega Makerspace, getting access to 3D printer and a couple kinds of CNC machines. I visited mom a couple of times, and got a lot of quality time in with Denali.

But, I spent SO. MUCH. TIME. being worried about being a deadbeat. I could tell myself until I was blue in the face that getting laid off had nothing to do with me, that it didn’t reflect on who I am, and that I’d find another position soon enough, but I couldn’t really internalize that. I mostly stopped playing video games, because I didn’t want to be that unemployed guy who sat around and played video games all the time. I didn’t go to movies. I didn’t watch TV.

I devoted myself to finding a new job, starting out selectively and towards the end taking more of a shotgun approach. By the time we got to June, I had applied for more than 100 positions. I got two interviews. For the first one, after eight hours of interviews, I was told that it’d been very close but I was not the successful candidate (but couldn’t get a call back from a recruiter for the other lower-level versions of that position at that company). For the second position, the feedback from the hiring manager was that they wanted to hire someone they could “train into the position because they saw it as a future lead.”⁵ And it wasn’t just me. So far as I can tell, none of my colleagues had been able to find work either.

And then a few weeks ago, a former colleague asked me if I’d be interested in a temporary position supporting an old client. It was a great job, if pretty mediocrely compensated, but a way to get back to doing work I value, working with people I like, supporting a mission that’s important to me.

At that point, I’d stopped letting myself get excited or hopeful about jobs. I was feeling pretty beat down, but I threw myself into the application and prep. I had a blunt, honest conversation with a dear friend about my strengths and weaknesses in interviews, and I worked hard to take that conversation to heart and incorporate that feedback.

And … it worked. I started a new job on Monday. It’s a position working for a temp staffing company, but in support of a Foundation affiliate that I’ve had the pleasure of supporting before, ultimately doing a bit of backfill on my role that was eliminated, but also getting to do some cool, forward-thinking work. The benefits aren’t great, and I don’t get any of the perks that I’d gotten used to over the last few years at the Foundation, but it’s fully remote for now, which means that I can stay near my partner and see how that develops. And I got to spend my week reconnecting with colleagues and friends, and I got to hear them say wonderful things about how excited they are to work with me again and how hopeful they are that we can do great things together. And that’s pretty great; it’s exactly what my ego and my heart needed after a pretty rough four months.

I’m not going to say that things happen for a reason. That’s trite, and even at my most optimistic I don’t believe in any grand plan for myself, let alone the universe. It feels like a cop out, too, telling people that the shitty things that happen to them aren’t shitty things.⁶

But, sometimes, the things that happen to us can lead us to new opportunities, if we remain open to them and are willing to jump when we see them. In the end, I keep a roof over my head, Denali well-fed, and myself back to being able to say that I’m a lawyer for an organization I’m proud to work with. And that’s not nothing.

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1. Whatever frustrations I may have about the Foundation’s historical support for charter schools. ↩︎
2. See, e.g., https://www.mymcmedia.org/maryland-attorney-general-gives-legal-updates-related-to-mass-layoffs/ ↩︎
3. Because, as Shakespeare noted, a tyrant’s first act is to eliminate those who might effectively oppose him. ↩︎
4. Denali is a HUGE fan of both Kristi and the cats. The cats … are less thrilled but we’re working on it. ↩︎
5. I think, more than anything, this was an inartful attempt by the hiring manager to avoid making me feel bad or directly criticizing my interview, but also not something you say to a 40-something lawyer who you interviewed for employment. ↩︎
6. And in the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t that bad. I never worried about food or shelter, or food or shelter for Denali; as heartbreaking as this whole thing has been I have been warm, and safe, and secure, and I’m deeply thankful for my support network and the way they have stepped up for me over the last few months. ↩︎