I was working at a job that I had devoted my life to for almost six years when the company got sold, and I found myself laid off. I didn’t really have a lot in the bank, had taken out student loans and even a car loan after an accident that left my old car totaled just a month prior, not to mention rising credit card debt.
I panicked, to say the very least, and went into a period of depression that actually led to contemplating suicide.
I kept asking God why he put me through something so terrible, never realizing this was a pattern of mine—to deny what I really wanted to do in life and follow the wrong path for the sake of acceptance (from family/friends/society), and my stubbornness and bad decision making were the reasons I felt used and abused for pretty much all of my life.
In an attempt to pull myself back from the edge, I returned to doing things I loved to do before the “reality” that is adulthood hit, and found myself drawing again and creating other forms of art, but mostly writing.
I wrote about what I’d been through after being laid off, planning on using it as a means of therapy to show myself that I’d done nothing to deserve it, when a great idea came to me…
I decided to take my pain and entries and make them into a novel—a series, even! Not only was I still allowing myself to heal by writing down all I had been through, but I could also share it with others who were going through the same thing, or looking to take their minds off of their own streak of bad luck.
I wrote and completed my first novel a week before I finally got a call back for a new job (almost a year after losing the last, and four months after writing my novel). By this time, my attitude had improved dramatically, I was no longer suicidal, I had hope, and it was all because I realized events had come full circle to remind me of what I really wanted to be doing with my life—writing!
As painful as it was, as much as I’d never want to relive that year, losing a job I had foolishly treated as a career had allowed me to break free from the belief that if you work your classic nine-to-five and just push for your promotions, that was all you needed to get that big beautiful home and be debt free.
I was finally given an opportunity to be a writer, and I’m so happy to say that, and while the memory of my lay-off still stings, if it weren’t for that awful push out their front doors, I’d never had stumbled into the luck of finding out what I really want to do with my life.
