The total monthly expenses, stripped down, came to almost exactly my severance monthly payment. I had no margin. The savings existed as the margin.
Six months, maybe seven if something broke my way. After that, the math stopped working.
This is the first time I am going to say something about grief, which I mention because I think people underestimate what losing a job looks like when the job was also the place you’d spent most of your adult life.
I was not simply unemployed. I was no longer a person who worked at Morgan Freight Coordination. That distinction sounds small until you try to remove it: every Sunday evening I had spent, for eighteen years, with a low-grade awareness of Monday morning and what it would require. Every difficult problem had been a Morgan Freight Coordination problem. Every carrier call, every client issue, every late Friday exception I’d stayed at my desk to resolve — all of that had been one continuous thing, and now the thing was over.
I cried twice. Once in the shower, which has the advantage of plausible deniability. Once while looking at the Alder exception log on my personal computer, which I had not exported or copied but had worked on long enough to remember in detail. I wasn’t looking at a file I’d taken. I was looking at my own memory. There is no confidentiality violation in your own recall.
Then I built a resume.
Building a resume at forty-two, when your entire career has been at one company, requires a particular kind of translation. You have to convert institutional knowledge into industry-recognized skills. You have to describe work that everyone at the company already understood and present it to people who have no context for it.