uh, concluded

Thank you all for your friendship in the last 24 hours. To my surprise, yesterday was my best stats day ever. I don’t know if that means a bunch of car-wreck lookie-loos were added in with my normal traffic, or what, but there it is.

This is a very long post, because I wrote a substantial post about everything that happened yesterday (indented) and then added to it this morning. My apologies. If you only want to know what happened, the first couple of paragraphs will do ya.

OG called me into her office first thing in the morning on Thursday and told me that she’s letting go all the administrative staff (three of us) at the end of July. The money in the firm has been drying up, and there doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon that will change this. So we will be farming out the cases we currently have to other firms who will do all the actual work on them, and we (although by then it won’t be “we” anymore, it’ll be “they”) will get some cut of the settlement proceeds due to the referrals.

Last year, three cases which were expected to bring in at least a million dollars apiece settled for less than $100,000 total. This year, something I can’t discuss happened with another case that caused us to lose hundreds of thousands of already-spent dollars, and a couple million potential dollars. I think that these four cases, plus the general non-lending economy, are the reason this is happening.

I am shocked and upset, and absolutely terrified, but there are so many strong good things about this situation that I’m having a hard time weighing them meaningfully against the bad.

• • I wanted to leave anyway. (Huge.)
  • I didn’t know how to handle telling the (constructive) in-laws that I wanted to leave. Them telling me to leave, without telling me I suck, is so perfect.
  • Everyone else is being laid off too, it’s not just me. This is terrible for them but makes me feel a jillion times better.
  • OG has offered to aggressively help me get another job by calling her contacts. She’s been doing this job for 20 years, so her contacts are substantial.
  • This happened after I finished with the paralegal certificate.
  • On June 29th I will have been here for two years exactly.  Two years is a decent amount of time, and a lot longer than I’ve worked continuously anywhere else.
  • This is a major crisitunity!

My brain keeps whispering, even through the shock, that this is an opportunity I should seize. That my depression and wandering mind and crazy creative impulses of late should combine with this change to create a bridge out of the legal field and into an enchanted place.

The part of me that is still not recovered from the period of poverty in New England is saying, NO, stupid, you make the majority of the money in your household, you have to make at least X dollars per year for you and BF to make it, you have student loan payments and bad debt and household expenses to worry about and you can’t be trying to live a life that you’re not stable enough for, not ready for yet. Wait another couple of years, when you’ll have less debt and BF is making more money, and then you can fly.

Really? Is that what I should do? Or is this the shove off the cliff that I’ve been needing?

I’ve been thinking for the past week how I can try to afford teacher training sooner rather than later. Crazy things have come into my mind, like fundraising, or asking my father for a loan (I swore I’d never take money from him again, but a loan might not be a violation of that oath), or asking my father and some other people for separate, smaller loans, or something. Weird ideas have floated through my mind. Work on your horror novel again. See if your bank will give you a loan despite your credit score. Stop worrying about the loans coming due next spring – worry about it next spring. Go on and get on those substitute lists. All these things my brain was telling me even before I was told I’d be laid off, and I honestly cannot tell if it’s just wishful thinking, just me floundering around for a way to be happier when I’m simply having to pay my dues like everyone else in the world. Or – or – if I’m actually getting a message from the universe at large.

On the third hand, maybe the message is just “Here, we know you hate this job, let’s painlessly get you out of it.” To think that I’m being told to blow in the wind might be, as I said, wishful thinking. But maybe if I went for it anyway, it would be a better lesson (i.e., go out and grab the wind and ride it, no matter how bumpy, if given the smallest chance) – and would help me to get the hell over the New England thing.

I don’t know. I don’t know. Now that this has happened, even crazier thoughts are coming into my head. Applying for that grad program in Rochester that I want so much. Going to live with my mother for six months to save money. Or even taking this opportunity, this hiccup in my job stability, for me and BF to move somewhere else – Towson, or even Texas or California.

Later in the day, MD came to my office and re-told me what OG told me. He also said, interestingly, that he is attempting to get other financing so that none of this has to happen at all. He was so sorry, he said, so so sorry, to do this to us.* He said the chances were about 50/50 that the financing would go through, so he had asked OG to tell us what she told us so we’d be ready in case it didn’t.

Yes, I find this bizarre too.

I sat there with my hands folded, listening, my face neutral. This is what I always do whenever he comes into my office to tell me something. I have learned that if I say anything at all other than yes or no, or if I try to explain that I don’t know how to do something or have been told something contradictory to what he asks of me, nothing changes and I only get enraged, so I always just sit there and say nothing. Sometimes this is extremely difficult. This time was perhaps the most difficult ever. I was trembling, little explosions going off in my head, my tongue twitching with unsaid words. At one point my vision went white for a split second. But I listened. This must not have been satisfactory for him, because about an hour later after he’d left the office for whatever reason he called me and repeated the exact same little speech. I said “Okay” twice, because that was all I had to say.

If I can find another job, or another answer to this crisitunity, but the financing goes through anyway, you’d better believe I’m still hot-footing it outta here. Yesterday I liked work far less than usual, because it all seemed so pointless. The good news is that I now have the exact same feelings as before about getting another job, but I have OG’s endorsement and help, and a lot more motivation.

Unless that’s not what I’m supposed to do at all.

I am extremely confused.

*Since his salary could pay mine six times over or more, his words rang a little hollow to me. (I know he has to have that kind of salary to maintain his lifestyle, but still.) I’m sure that he is genuinely sorry, and that there isn’t another solution that will work for him and for the firm, but I really didn’t want to hear it from him.

You’d better believe that BF and I had a very long talk last night about all this. After I got home from yoga. A couple of weird plans had started circling in my head, but the one that I thought I’d act on immediately was to ask Kathleen if she could put me on a sub list, or even give me a beginner class on the weekend or something. Even if she said no on both counts, I wanted her input on my current situation. I found that she was in Ohio for the week when I got to the studio, and my little feverishly overthinking brain went, “So, that’s a sign from the universe that this isn’t what I’m supposed to do. Right?” It’s pretty frustrating when you start trying to inject the actions of the universe into everything you do, because you wind up thinking that your gum losing its flavor is some kind of a sign.

My regular Thursday teacher wasn’t there, and we had a substitute, a lady I’ve talked with many times and whom I like a great deal. This was the first class I had taken from her, and she is a terrible teacher. I tried very hard to just be in the moment and allow her to do what she did, but I was extremely frustrated by the unbalanced way she’d set up class and the fact that she gave NO guidance to a lady who was taking her first yoga class ever. (There were only five people in class, so it wasn’t like she was too busy with the rest of us.)

When I got home BF and I talked. He is inclined to be a more moderate human being in general than I am, and so he thought I should just get another paralegal job and try to do the other, crazy stuff at the same time. He said that there’s no reason I can’t leave the job in six months and go off on my own path. This is true, but I’m so immoderate that my feeling is that I have to either use this crisitunity as a complete break with the life I knew, or go back to the way things were and resign myself to another few years of grind and saving before I can do what I want. I am leaving this issue unresolved for now until I see how the job search goes, and whether the circling plans ever land and materialize into action.

I will just say that I did not sleep well, and leave it there. I did not dream, I think because my sixth chakra was all used up with the envisioning and crazy ideas I’d been working on all day. When I woke up I felt defeated and colorless, as if I wanted to put my tail between my legs and get another paralegal job and just forget the rest of it. A lot of that has lasted up to now. I think I may implement this one idea that I think will be a lot of work but may yield incredible rewards, whichever road I decide to move forward upon, but I’m feeling less enthusiastic about it, about myself, about life in general this morning.

If you got to the bottom of this post, you get a gold medal. Thanks again for your comments yesterday. They genuinely helped.