Seeking Stability
Physical therapy isn't enough. Your whole lifestyle needs to support stability in order to regain stability
Happy Sunday, friends and readers.
This week is a rough cut of reflections on the theme that’s been especially top of mind for the last week, but has been a throughline of reflection ever since December of last year, when I was laid off from my previous job. It’s a bit of a ramble, but an important one, and one that I hope I could flesh out into a really compelling, polished nonfiction essay at some point in the future when I’ve fully healed and what I’m going through finally “makes sense.”
The overall lesson I expect to take from this experience (one day) is the sub-headline of this piece: that in order to really recover, your whole lifestyle needs to arc toward the goal of stability in order to regain stability. Right now I’m still “in the cave” and trying to survive, unsure of how to optimize for stability while experiencing extreme, involuntary instability in my physical and professional life—which have become unfortunately intertwined.
This isn’t a polished reflection, but it’s true and should give you a sense of what’s been on my mind in the wake of a week of a corporate re-org, swath of layoffs, and the fact that my left leg is still and for the foreseeable future heartbreakingly unstable.
There’s a big difference between voluntary instability and involuntary instability. When I quit my job, moved out of the Northeast, took a road trip, and spent a year writing and “fighting” in BJJ full-time between 2021-2022, that was voluntary instability. I opted into shaking up my own life, into completely uprooting and unmooring myself from places and people I love. That was a psychological and emotional gauntlet of my own choosing. I wanted it. I wrote a book about it (even if it’s not published yet). I got both what I wanted and needed out of that sabbatical period that was not exactly a “rest” so much as a reclaiming of my time and a reset of perspective of what in my life—not just on a mat—was most worth fighting for.
My life is better for having endured that period of instability. It was a deliberate choice over complacency, comfort, and the persistent “what if?” questions that came with staying where I was—thirty years old, in Boston, settling into the city simply because I was already there, feeling myself plateau, burning myself out in a job that wasn’t quite right, and worrying about the extent to which my life was driven by my late father’s values rather than my own.
I took the the necessary risks to live some big dreams and eliminate some regrets while I was still young(-ish) enough to do them and had the luxury of timing to carve out the opportunity to do them, timing being the 2020 era. The pandemic led to a collective suspension of judgment of people chasing new alternative ways of living and of making a living. People were plenty concerned about whether I’d get COVID while training and traveling, but they understood why I decided to take the risks I did at the time. I also didn’t really care about others’ concern as much as I was determined to alleviate my own: I loved jiu-jitsu and wanted to see if I had what it took to become a world champion. I loved writing and there was nothing I wanted more than to become a published author. At the tail end of 2020, I believed that the only way I could fully live without regrets was if I went all-in on both endeavors for a little while and tried to see if time away from the professional world could give me what I wanted from both “fighting” and writing.
I am glad I took my bold leap into the unknown when I did, opted into instability when I did. It’s harder to chase an athletic dream in a combat sport when you’re 34 going on 35 rather than 29 going on 30. If I were to quit my job and try to train full-time with professional BJJ athletes in California again, I would be poorly suited to do it now, even if I were uninjured. The kids are better than ever, and both my body and my ego would have been crushed even harder. I wasn’t worried about paying a mortgage or starting a family at 30. Both these things—especially the latter—occupy greater and more urgent headspace at 34.
Voluntary instability is a luxury, I’m realizing. Going on sabbatical, moving across the country, starting your own company, starting a family: when you elect to do something destabilizing in your life from a place of strength, even if it shakes you up, that is intentionality. That is power.
For the last eight months, I’ve been grappling with an unprecedented degree of involuntary instability. Ever since the injury in February and the operation in April, the impacts of consistent, unrelenting, and involuntary instability have escalated to a fever pitch. I’ve struggled to put it into words. When I sat down to write this morning, I thought I would be writing just about the last week in my post-op journey: how a brutal re-org and associated layoffs affected my mental health and physical recovery in the last week.
But when I started to journal about it, I realized that this sense of period of instability has been longer than just a week or a few weeks. It’s been for much longer, preceding the operation, even.
It started with being my laid off in December. The managing director of the New York office of the agency where I worked at the time came on-screen after putting an ad hoc “Quick Sync” on my calendar at 9:30AM. My stomach dropped. I knew what that meeting was and what it meant as soon as I saw it.
I’d won an office MVP award via peer nomination a few months ago, recognizing me for my work and my leadership. I had been considered an extremely valuable asset to the team and was considered the go-to authority for my domain on forthcoming pitches and projects. I had a direct report and was well respected by my manager. I had exceeded expectations, been adaptable, and passed any tests with flying colors.
I join the virtual meeting. He’s already there. We sit in an uncomfortable silence, knowing what is about to happen. He begins.
“Erica, I’m gutted. Absolutely gutted,” the managing director tells me. I think of fish being deboned, butchers cleaning pigs entrails, 90s horror movies. I think of blood and feel blood in my throat.
He had bright blue eyes and a very ‘60s haircut that made him seem more so a hippie than a leader of a New York office of a global creative agency. A perennial promoter of the positive, for the eighteen months I’d worked with him, he seemed incapable of being sad, or at least, unable to relay a sad sentence in the warmth of his British accent.
It turns out he could be sad.
As he starts rattling off the legal-tight script of select things he’s allowed to say before handing things off to HR, I stare down at my plate. I had breakfast ready to eat at my desk, but had hardly gotten one bite into the eggs on my plate. I’d only used the side of the fork to slice through the sunny-side-up yolks that felt anything but sunny-side up this morning. The yolk oozed out and congealed as the plate grew cold. Tears burst out and words congeal in my mouth as my demeanor turns cold
How could he say he was gutted? This egg was gutted. I was gutted.
“We tried to fight for you, and I am so, so sorry.”
I still got laid off. I felt it deeply and personally even if it wasn’t an inherently personal decision. What made me saddest at the time was the dawning of an acute awareness that even though I was a person, I was also a number on a ledger, a number that could be subtracted in order to make some more important number add up.
I was laid off on a Friday, got my resume in order over the weekend, and thanks to a highly-productive chain of gossip, a former employee of the agency knew I was on the market. He asked if I would be interested in working with one of our clients in an in-house capacity, a client I’d worked with for roughly a year at the agency and was a “devil I knew,” for better or worse.
Lacking other options and with hiring being slow during the holiday season, I told him I was interested in the role. This was not a disingenuous statement. I was interested in the role because I was interested in my own survival. Four interviews and three weeks after being laid off, I had a verbal commitment of a job offer. I started the new job three weeks after the new year.
Coming into 2024, the involuntary instability of a layoff had turned into the predictable instability of starting something new. I was relieved that I had a source of income, health insurance, and no visible gaps on my resume to haunt me through the new year. The job was hard, but I liked the people, and I believed that I could do well once I got my bearings and “eased into the place,”as much as anyone can ease into a fully remote role in which so little feels tangible.
Three weeks into the new job, I blow out my knee.
Three months into the new job, I launch the first project I’ve directly managed—sitting on a couch, two business days after I’ve had knee surgery, with a heavy dose of painkillers floating in my bloodstream.
Six months and change into the new job, I am “crushing it,” but burnt out to an unprecedented degree. My bloodstream is caffeinated at a minimum of 300 mg/day. What hair I haven’t pulled out has has noticeably thinned. I am studded with painful cystic acne pustules in odd spots on my back and my collarbone. A furrow line of my brow is prominent. My right arm has broken out in hives. And, of course, my left leg is embarrassingly, inevitably weak.
“Or is it?” I’ve started to think.
Of late, I have wondered about the instability of my left leg and the extent to which my job—or my relationship with work, overall—is helping or hurting my recovery.
Having work to keep me busy while I can’t do the hobbies I love—and having work to pay the bills and afford my health insurance—is important, if not critical. But the extent to which my work is interfering with my wellbeing and ability to heal is becoming just as critical.
I’m essentially on call at all hours. I’m not in a position to say “no” or delegate as often as I need to be in order to heal.
I don’t feel like I am in a position of power to advocate for the time I need to heal or set the boundaries I need in order to survive. There have been two rounds of layoffs since I joined the company. I do not feel grounded. Little feels certain or stable in my life on that laptop screen five days a week. Even less feels stable when I finally stand up from my desk, try to do exercises, try to see friends and be in the world and create the necessary distance from my machine and the violent vortex of work that it contains.
I am not wedded to a recovery timeline at this point, and not keen on comparing myself to others who have had this surgery with “better” results at the 4 months out mark from a knee surgery like mine. But I can’t help but think that I’d be walking better or going down stairs with ease if the energy I was allocating into staying afloat at my job was being used toward my recovery.
The involuntary instability of the last eight months—of layoff, injury, surgery, and the state of the environment in which I currently work—has been a lot for me. Too much, if I’m being honest. I don’t see an imminent or easy ‘reset’ or way to defuse the tension, “do less” or otherwise find stability outside of the friends or spousal support to snap me out of the vacuous fugue state in which I find myself five days a week come 9 o’ clock most nights.
I have not been particularly honest about it in writing, in part due to living through it and not making sense of it yet, but also in part because work is sapping all reserves of my creative energy. During the week, I have no gas in the tank for writing even for the baseline purpose of sense of my feelings. Every bit of my brain is spent on scheduling meetings, setting timelines, generating communications, and keeping “important” things on track.
It’s one thing to get money in exchange for your time. It’s another to get money in exchange for your soul. And when I cannot stand on two good legs, I have a hard time doing the work to separate what I am being paid for and what I am not being paid for.
If I were fully healthy, my work would not be not worth the physical and mental toll it is taking on me. Because I am not fully healthy, and because my work is worsening my health more than it is improving it, the situation is more severe. I’ve been exchanging time for money, but there’s been another hidden cost in that transaction: my soul.
I spend Saturday recovering from the week and Sunday remembering who I am and what I care about. Once Monday comes, I forget all about it, sucked into the machine, degrading as the week goes on. By Friday night, I am mute and dumb, unable to engage with life. I get no joy from petting my dogs. I can’t have a conversation with my husband that is thoughtful or present. I can’t communicate in anything beyond a one-line sentence of a status update.
I am stuck in this continuous exercise of remembering and forgetting. I go to bed forgetting the surgery, and wake up, trying to walk to the bathroom, and remember. I write on Sunday mornings, feeling grounded and well-rested and rehydrated, and wondering, “Why do I do this to myself? Is there a boundary I can set? A way I can change my situation? What can I do to fix this?”
And I try to fix it. I mute my phone before 9AM. I try to sign off “early.” It’s a bad drug, the work. And it always seems to make itself more urgent and important than the fact that I cannot walk, because if it could, work would have me never step away from my chair. Work would have me believe that there is power in my never getting up and never getting away from the screen. But it’s not true.
I fully believe that there will be a time when I can reclaim enough stability in my legs and in my life to be in a place where I can opt for some joyful bout of voluntary stability again. Until then, what I put down here, week over week, is what keeps me going. Unable to train, writing is the only activity I have as an anchor to cope with the way things feel right now: highly and involuntarily unstable.
Thanks for reading and sticking with me.
See you next week,
EZ
For the sake of your sanity and your recovery, I hope you can find that extra well of energy to get out of there. “Bad drug” is such an accurate description. When I worked for Kohl’s Corporate, it was like this. I grew addicted to the churn and burn even though I hated it with every fiber. But when I finally got out, despite the difficulty of learning a new role (and new-to-me technology), I remember thinking: damn I wish I had left that soul-sucking hellhole sooner. I hope your “darkest before dawn” hour is now, and the light starts to crack through.