Mortgage: first line, largest number. Health insurance: acquired independently, significantly more expensive than the payroll-deducted version, clarifying in the way that certain numbers are clarifying when they become visible as full amounts rather than partial deductions. Utilities. Phone. Car insurance. Groceries, estimated from the last three months of what I actually spent. Gym membership — I kept this, deliberately, because I had been told by my therapist five years earlier that structured physical activity was my most reliable intervention for the thing she’d called “chronic low-grade anxiety that functions as baseline,” and I had observed this to be accurate.
I canceled the streaming services I rarely used. I looked at what was left.
The monthly total, stripped to essentials, was approximately equal to my monthly severance payment. This meant my savings — which I had built in the way you build savings on a salary that is adequate but not surplus, a little each month, more in good years, less in bad ones — were the margin between the math working and the math not working.
I had slightly under three months of living expenses in savings. This was not a small amount. It was also not a comfortable amount for someone in a specialized professional field who might need six months to find the right position.
Total runway: six to seven months if careful. Then the math stopped.
I wrote “six months” on a notepad. Not as a deadline, exactly — more as a shape of the situation. The situation had a shape. I was going to operate inside that shape until I found something.