Dear subscriber,
I am taking a break from excerpts from Near and Far and will be posting some notes from The Next Day over the next few weeks.
The Next Day is a bundle of notes I wrote during lockdown in 2020. These notes are about grief and, specifically, how you grieve for the loss of a vocation. To write them I drew on my own experience of grief and my observations of the many people - including many creatives and artists - who were suddenly being locked out of their vocations due to the pandemic.
A caveat:
The Next Day reads as being written about a specific context - the pandemic lockdowns and their effect on certain people being able to pursue their vocations. But I think that what I have to write about grief and loss or diminishment of vocation is still relevant as we face the disruptions of the effects of economic downturns, climate catastrophes, AI on jobs, and other challenges. I plan to update The Next Day at some stage so I am actually curious to share some excerpts with you to see what you think:
In the meantime, enjoy this bonus introductory post plus another tomorrow morning.
The Next Day - Introduction
How many times in the past have I thought “Oh no I DON’T believe this is happening! What am I going to do?” Over the years, I have had so many projects go belly-up, so many jobs go sour, have earnt the enmity of so many managers and office bullies, that some of my (kind and beautiful) friends have taken to taking one look at my face when I turn up to their place to get sloshed and said, “what happened THIS time?”
I have had many, many adventures in the workplace; my career has definitely taken the scenic route. I am not as awful a person as this might suggest; a combination of my penchant for taking risks, or speaking truth to power, or going on crusades, and just some pure dumb luck have seen me experience my fair share of failures. After each body-blow, I did the psychological maths, speculating on how devastated I would feel this time. I would wonder “how am I going to face tomorrow?” knowing that, after I had had time to sleep on the bad news, I would wake up with the challenge of putting myself back together and getting through that next day, and the one after that, and the one after that, while feeling so raw and shattered.
And then what? How to make a living when I just wanted to tell the world to go fuck itself? But angry thoughts and devastated feelings won’t pay the rent. Having been chewed up and spat out by yet another workplace I would have to scramble for survival in the short term while looking for that safe place – that ‘home’ – where I could do my best work in safety.
During 2020 I have actually survived quite well, which is a miracle for someone with my peripatetic career path. But I have watched on in concern and anger as certain groups of workers have seen their sectors trashed and their jobs lost, only to find themselves excluded from wage subsidies or other government assistance.
From March to September of 2020, I thought a lot about grief. I thought about losing work and how hard that hits. I thought about the challenge of surviving when you don’t think you have the energy to survive. And I started to write.
Has your sector imploded?
“Ruins prove, at the least, that someone has been there. When your life is in ruins, look for yourself among them. Then restore yourself.” ~ JD Landis
“The purpose of grief is to help you reweave the story of your life together.” ~ Art Markman and Michelle Jack
Has your sector imploded? Did you lose access to it, or your place in it, due to lockdown or redundancy? Are there widespread job cuts, not just in your organisation, but sector-wide?
Have you lost your place in the world?
If you work in the arts sector you may have seen your entire industry enter a shut down that may last months or years. You may be one of many thousands of arts workers who is not eligible for the JobKeeper subsidy; you may be wondering how on earth you are going to make a living.
The university sector is also struggling. If you work in that sector you may have seen your future possible career path disappear. I know researchers or sessional teachers who believe that they may never work in academia again. Professional staff have also been adversely affected.
Perhaps you work in another sector that has undergone a seismic shift in the way it operates, leaving you either out of work or in fear of that.
Losing a job is bad enough; people struggle with loss of income, identity, purpose, and opportunity. But in this recession, and with the challenge of living with the coronavirus for an indeterminate amount of time, people are dealing with an economy that is shifting and changing. Some people are dealing with not just a loss of a role, but with the loss of a career, a vocational pathway, or access to a sector.
How this affects people will vary depending on the individual, their temperament, their levels of resilience, and the conditions to which they are responding. Some may be devastated. Some may be resigned. Some may even be liberated. Some may be feeling a mixture of things or may be too shocked or numb to know how to think and feel about this unprecedented change right now.
People are in grief.
Many people will be feeling overwhelmed. Many people will be craving the opportunity to make sense of all this.
Sense-making can take time and reflection…
Do you have that?
Or is life crowding in: your kids need you; your ageing parents need you; your co-workers who have also lost their jobs keep talking at you; you have to find a way of paying the rent next month.
Our government keeps urging us all to ‘snap back’ to ‘normal’, whatever the hell normal is these days. Do you feel like snapping back? Or do you feel like hiding under a doona?
If people are dealing with overwhelming reactions to the grief or fear of losing a vocation, then their need to process this will be out of alignment with the demands of an economy and societal culture that insists that they get on and earn some money.
People are being placed in a position where they urgently need to make big, far-reaching decisions about how they use their time, energies, and skills to earn a living; they may not be in a state of mind that lends itself to making snap decisions.
The need to grieve versus the need to pursue revenue: These things require different energies and could conflict. This may well be irresolvable; there is no magic bullet. But I think it helps to be mindful of your state of grief, and how it might be informing the way you are thinking about your future relationship to work. The Next Day is an attempt to help you do that.
Disclaimer for my friends in the arts:
In a couple of the notes in The Next Day, I briefly write about my decision to give up my career in the performing arts years ago but these notes do not have the intention of persuading you to give up your vocation in the arts. Just because I chose to give up a certain vocation doesn’t mean that you should. Unless you want to. When I refer to grief in your particular case, I am thinking about how the arts industry will be undergoing radical change over the next few years, and how, for those of you still determined to pursue an arts career, what has died is not necessarily that vocation, but the way in which you expected to be able to pursue it. The pathway you were pursuing as part of the pre-COVID-19 ‘old normal’ has died, not necessarily your vocation.
That’s it for today…
There will be another post for paid subscribers tomorrow. If you would like a copy of The Next Day then it is actually free, so you can just go to my website and download it. And paid subscribers can also obtain a free copy of any of my e-books upon request.
regards,
Meredith
I've been dealing with the loss of so many things I don't know where to start. I am slowly trying again to work my way through stuff.