COVID has been expensive. Not only has it cost me my employment, forced all my everyday expenses to bloat, and eaten away my savings while starving my retirement, but it has also forced me to pay a toll in personal identity and humility. Prior to COVID, I frequently used my career as an excuse to not pursue things that I have wanted for myself and dismissed my extracurricular ambitions as either impractical or too time consuming to go after. Although this pandemic has been a catastrophic force in my life, it has also served as a catalyst for removing the excuses I have been using for years to limit myself.
I did not expect to be laid off. I had devoted so much energy and time to my profession that the idea was incomprehensible, and others agreed. Former employees and peers began decrying the decision, friends reached out with leads, and my partner reassured me that I would land on my feet. Every comment was geared towards my obvious and immediate return to corporate life. But then came the shot across the bow by one of my oldest friends: “Now is the time to start breaking this link you have between labor and self-worth!” It was a jarring a statement. I showed it to another friend and hated the response: “I mean, Sam. Come on. When is the last time you wrote something? All you ever do is work.”
This was how the people I valued the most saw me, and I was only now realizing it. Not a professional, not someone who had her life dialed to operational efficiency, not someone who had it figured out. Just someone who had learned to mistake corporate toil as identity and learned they were disposable despite their efforts. For years I had internalized my value as a person with my contributions via my career. I spent more than a decade overworking myself, eyeballing P&L reports, and watching my name rise on industry hustle boards only for it all to be wiped out with a phone call. I spent that same decade placing restrictions on myself and my time. I ignored my photography, shunned my art, pretended I did not have a hard drive half full of abandoned stories, and told myself that it was okay that I had not finished my degree because I was working, I was thriving. It became easy to tell myself that anything extra was time away from work and was thus selfish.
Even as I was feeling the financial burden of unemployment during a global crisis, I had been gifted something I had not had a surplus of in years–time. I had been granted an opportunity to figure out exactly who it was I wanted to be away from work, and it began with evaluating who I had been before and what I wanted to change. Did I want to continue being the kind of person who talks about being a writer but only ever fills her shelves with writing guides and never finishes a manuscript? Did I want to keep watching interviewers go from excitement to polite but chilled once the subject of my education arose?
Now that I had time, I needed to find a way to use it well. I joined a weekly poetry workshop hosted by the same friend whose text message triggered my identity crisis. I unearthed novels I had allowed to go dormant and began work on them again. I pulled out my camera, activated Photoshop, and began creating new art with mixed media. These were all things I used to do, all things I loved to do, and all things I had ceased doing along the way when I began allowing someone other than myself to earmark my time. The process began to feel like an excavation. I began digging back through time to a period before my job and before the excuses. I had begun to recover a sense of identity that was separate from my ability to operate in an economic system and instead engage directly with who I could be. It even eventually led to giving myself permission to return to school and complete my degree.
Job loss during COVID is humbling. Unemployment in Colorado hit 8.4% in December 2020, making for some of the worst odds in the nation. Even when I do land an interview, I am aware that I am in competition with scores of others who are equally qualified and have an education that I currently lack. That is nothing to say of the alien experience of having these conversations with masks on. To date I have spent $3,273 on COBRA payments since my layoff in July 2020. This number does not account for the co-payments that I still pay every month for my medication and providers. I have watched my 401k contract, expand, contract again, and then stall out entirely, adding years to when I might be able to retire. I have seen my carefully amassed savings drip away every month, and I have sat with a lot of uncertainty about what the future will hold for me. However, despite the hardship and trauma of COVID, I can say that whatever that future holds, I will be able to experience it as a more authentic version of myself, a version that makes time for me.
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Samantha Wells is a business student with a background in specialty technology and ambitions in writing. She escaped the swamps of the South to make it to the mountains of Colorado. Her mother is discouraged by Samantha’s use of cussing as a means of punctuation. Her cat, Boo Berry Waffles, does not appear to mind.
