It hit me today just how terrible the last three years have been for me. I came into work earlier and my company was offering a voluntary separation deal, full pay, full benefits, job placement help, for three to six months. It would be perfect for me. But I haven’t been here quite long enough to qualify.
It’s not just that the economy has been terrible for the last three years, it’s that it happened at the worst possible time it could have happened in my life, when a couple of loved ones were diagnosed with deadly diseases, when the layoffs began in earnest and my friends and family and me all lost our benefits when we needed them to literally survive, when I begin to hit age fifty and could count on obvious age bias in trying to find any job that paid a basic living wage, even one far below what I’m used to making, etc. On top of which every goddamn job, relationship, or source of money or happiness of any kind that might have worked out in my favor over the last three years instead fell through completely, or worked out against me in some way, the separation deal above being only the latest such opportunity lost. And when I did have a heads-I-lose tails-you-win decision to make, inevitably it turned out I chose the worst of the two. It seems improbabale my luck could continue being so lousy, but I’ve said that time and time again for several years now and it just gets worse.
It’s just been awful. The worst, most horrible, joyless, agonizing, hopeless, loneliest three years of my life. Nothing that ever came before even remotely prepared me for it.