obliteration

I don’t think I’m the only one who feels totally undone by 2025.

This year has undone the threads of my fabric of being. Significant parts of my life have been unmade, after years of careful cultivation and making.

In 2023 I thought I knew what it meant to start over: I’d been working a steady job for 5 years, getting promoted every 10 months or so, and felt like I knew myself and what I wanted out of life.

But a good friend had told me at the start of my career in that steady retail/corporate job that the world would be poorer if I didn’t pursue my creative dreams, and that idea stuck in me like a cut on the flesh of my hand that healed and turned into a light scar that I see every time I look at my hands, and old friends would comment on if they hadn’t seen me in a while.

So in 2023 I left that job and started over. I was a novice in an industry I had long dreamt of but felt cut off from.

And it didn’t scare me.

I was held by the years I had poured into being fucking excellent at my job, and I arrived as a debutante who felt comfortable being uncomfortable. I could answer a call from a stranger without sweating in anxiety, and dove into new systems with excitement.

When people asked me how it felt leaving a steady job of 5 years for an 8 week contract I answered honestly: it felt okay. I knew it would be alright, that I would be alright, and that being an unemployed arts worker was better than being an unhappy retail worker.

In January of this year my relationship of nearly 4 years ended. She is still my best friend, and we still frequently devolve into fits of laughter because we still share a language of the ridiculous. Our relationship didn’t end for a lack of love, but it did end.

Since then I have had to rediscover my needs, my wants, my desires, and I have learned some uncomfortable truths about the standard I accept, and my capacity for love. I have learned that dating in 2025 is a bit of a crap shoot, and that I am a romantic who doesn’t want a partner (great and obviously easy to deal with when talking to both over eager and apathetic dates).

Two weeks ago I was told that my job is being removed from the company I work for. This is an elegant way of avoiding calling it a redundancy, and a real slight after possibly the toughest year of my working life in the wake of other redundancies that have squeezed as much good will as I have out of me.

The last two weeks have fucking sucked.

I have repeated the stages of grieving at least twice, and even invented a new one (more on this in a later Substack).

I have sat at my desk at home and spontaneously burst into tears. I have yelled “fuck you” in the car repeatedly. I have put on a Florence and the Machine song and joked that it’s a really cathartic song for me, and then ugly cried at the bridge. I have not wanted to talk about it, and then talked about it too much. I’ve been rude to my parents, self destructive, and selfish.

Apparently all of this is pretty usual for a redundancy (yes I researched redundancies and found various articles about it that were both reassuring and annoying. I oscillate between being assured and annoyed.)

I feel unmoored, confused, dissociative, and vindictive.

So I have to accept what my beautiful friends have been telling me:

That if this hadn’t happened I would have kept pouring my good will into the leaking boat I’m in until I was empty and it sunk.

That I am not built to be an administrator, that arts organisations are meant to be for artists, and if I am not valued as an artist where I am then it is not the place for me.

That I have been honing my resilience all year, and this is not the earth shattering blow it feels like.

That I have started over before, and will start over many times in my life. That I will spend my life changing and reinventing and any semblance of stability is a temporary illusion, because my curiosity will not allow me to settle.

That the whole of this life and every experience is just silt, temporarily at rest before a tide comes along to disturb it, in an endless disturbance.

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Thanks for reading. It’s been a tough week. I hope you’re all doing alright out there. Persist, stand up for yourself and your rights as an employee, and if you’re not operating at your best right now (I know I’m not) that’s ok. Just get through it.

With love, as always.