Day Zero

I’ve been thinking about loss lately, and how it drops a person into a stress so heavy it’s often easier to just go back to whatever you were doing before and pretend the loss isn’t sitting there.

I’ve been thinking about it specifically in relation to job loss, using my own experience losing my job as a full-time stay-at-home parent as the closest thing I have to compare it to. My first instinct was to go get a new job, and I went straight back to the exact kind of work I’d done before, even though I’d never actually been happy doing it. That unhappiness came through in every application and every interview, clearly enough that nothing came of any of it.

I’m genuinely grateful for that now. Failing to get hired gave me breathing room I wouldn’t have taken for myself otherwise, room to actually deal with the loss instead of just papering over it with a new job.

I understand how consuming that kind of stress can be. My coach kept telling me to take time and go do something enjoyable. I resisted, convinced I should be doing something more productive instead. Eventually I got low enough that she just ordered it: fifteen minutes of something enjoyable.

So I did, because I always did what I was told. I spent a whole day testing things in fifteen-minute increments, things I used to enjoy, things I thought other people might enjoy, trying to remember what enjoyment even felt like anymore.

I think of that day as day zero. None of it actually worked in the moment; nothing I tried felt genuinely enjoyable. But the next day, my mood was noticeably better, even though nothing in my actual situation had changed. I was still alone. I was still nowhere near figuring out what I wanted. But something had shifted anyway.

That was the moment I realized mood and circumstance aren’t the same thing, and that I had more control over the first one than I’d ever assumed. Once I saw that clearly, I started actually testing different ways of living, rather than just waiting for my circumstances to improve first.

I’m grateful for that lost job now. It handed me time I never would have taken for myself otherwise.

If you’re thinking you don’t have the time, money, or energy to sit with something like this, that reaction was mine too. Getting that time, energy, or space is the actual first step, and it usually takes more creativity to find than you’d expect. I did things I never would have tried before that stretch of my life. Most of them didn’t work either. A few, unexpectedly, did.