I thought I had burned through all the possible emotions during the ordeal of the last year. All the bad ones at any rate. But yesterday I came face to face with one I thought I'd already dealt with...
Fear.
I'd had the fear of losing my job, which I did. I'd had the fear of losing the house, which we did. I'd had the fear of moving to the wasteland of Bakersfield, and here we are. What else was there to be afraid of?
As I learned yesterday, there was still the fear of coming to a complete, hopeless dead end in your career. Or more accurately, having your career become completely irrelevant. I overcame the other fears, or at least was able to gloss over them, by telling myself there would be other jobs, other houses, eventually. But I don't think there's going to be any glossing over the fact that the career that I had, and the work that I loved, my be gone for good.
Since the Fall of '08, when everything fell apart, I've scrambled to stay afloat, performing freelance triage, trying to keep the career alive until things rebounded. A year and a half later, things seem to be getter worse, not better.
The bulk of my income, such as it is, comes from two agencies - one in Bakersfield, one in LA. The Bakersfield agency has been in a long, slow death spiral from well before I arrived on the scene. It's only accelerated since the start of the new year, and now appears to be finally circling the drain. I give it a week, maybe two. I'd already been looking for something to replace it, but there's just absolutely nothing here.
But more distressing are the dark rumblings coming from the LA agency. I'd noticed the checks stopped arriving. You tend to notice these things when you're living check to check. A call to the accounting department revealed that half the department, and who knows how many more, had been let go. Whoever I spoke to assured me they'd jump right on it, but you could hear the panic in her voice.
So yesterday I hit the digital bricks, looking for work. I'd exhausted my contacts and sources years ago, and most of them are out of work now anyway. You know it's bad when a former studio VP is reduced to teaching spin classes. She and I used to be fairly inseparable back in the day. She commanded a multimillion dollar ad budget and we jetted all over the world doing photo shoots of movie stars and drinking heavily. Now she teaches a Butt Blaster class.
So I spent the better part of the day trawling for... anything. I'm registered with half a dozen placement firms in LA, but haven't heard a word from any of them in over a year. They have thousands of clients for each potential opening, but there aren't even any openings anymore. Craigslist, which not that long ago was a pretty fertile place to find work (at least for me) had nothing. Not unless I want to learn to become a tattoo artist, which maybe I shouldn't be so hasty to rule out. LinkedIn is a perverse joke - everyone on there is out of work. But we're linked! And then I found one site that was comprehensive, that culled together job listings from all over the web and condensed them down into one search engine. You entered your zip code, a few key words and a radius in miles that you'd be willing to commute. I entered our old zip code in LA (hope springs eternal) and chose "25 miles". Nothing. Fifty miles. Nothing. Seventy five miles, 100 miles. Nothing. It maxed out at 150 miles, and at that distance I'd be commuting to Mexico, but I had nothing to lose. And still... nothing. I tried every permutation of key words I could think of and yet... nothing.
My take away from the whole experience is that I am now officially useless, irrelevant. I might as well make buggy whips, that's how in demand my skills now are. And that was when the fear really hit.
Now what?
