Associate Advice, Layoffs, Notes from the Breadline

Notes from the Breadline: Happy

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Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.
After months of ceaseless rain, August descends languidly. As it wraps the city in its sweaty fist, the prevailing complaint of New Yorkers shifts seamlessly from “When will the sun come out?” to “I’m hot!” Tourists wrinkle their noses at the smell of ripening garbage on Broome Street, and my super takes up a shirtless vigil on the stoop outside our building. At night, the tables outside of neighborhood cafes fill with wilted hipsters, their carefully disheveled hair drooping damply.
“It’s 300 degrees outside,” my friend Bo announces one day on the phone. I am lying on the floor, watching the ceiling fan turn and thinking about the movie Casablanca, in which people managed to maintain their dignity despite heat and oppressive sartorial conventions. “It’s not so bad,” I say absently, watching the cat, who is attempting to drink out of his water dish without standing up. After a moment, he gives up and flops listlessly onto his side.
“Easy for you to say!” Bo snorts. “You don’t know what it’s like to have to dress up in a suit in 300-degree weather.”
I sit up, covered in cat hair, which has adhered itself to my sweaty clothes. I am like a human ice cream cone, I think, topped with particularly unappetizing sprinkles. It occurs to me that I have heard the sentiment that Bo is expressing – the assumption that I am unable to relate to the lives of working folk – several times since this heat wave started.
“Hmphf,” I say indignantly. “I remember exactly what it’s like to wear a suit to work when it’s 300 degrees out. Just because I’m not working right now, it doesn’t mean I can’t relate.”
Despite my protestations, however, I am secretly delighted. I have, I realize, discovered the silver lining in this storm cloud: I may be jobless and increasingly broke, but let’s face it — here in the breadline, every day is casual Friday.
I decide to pay a visit to Lat (who has been busily posting pictures of his sweaty visage on Facebook). I also suspect that his office is cooler than my apartment. At the very least, I can count on a chilly reception from the Fashionista staff, who regard my inelegance with mortified pity.
I arrive to find Lat stalking crabbily around the office with a watering can, looking harried. “What’s the matter?” I ask, flopping into a chair.
“Ugh,” Lat says irritably. “Elie went on vacation and left me to take care of his donut plant.” He pulls out a pair of pruning shears and begins to trim donut holes from its drooping branches. “I have a lot to do, and I’m really not in the mood to garden.”
“What can I do to help?” I ask, filling a cup from the burbling coffee fountain.


Lat pauses, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Well,” he says, “funny you should ask. I think I want you to give our readers some advice.” He rifles through a pile of papers, which spills over the edge of his desk and cascades onto the floor. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Paper avalanche.” I nod knowingly.
After a few minutes of digging, he pulls out an article from the New York Times, entitled “The Search – Accentuating the Positive After a Layoff.”
“After a layoff,” it begins, “your self-esteem and personal relationships may take a hit. Your bank account and quality of life may both spiral downward. You may not even be sure you can pay your mortgage or rent. And now you’re supposed to go out and convince employers that you’d be a great hire?” Notwithstanding its cheery title, the article goes on to discuss the “despair, hopelessness, depression, and anger” that plague job-seekers during prolonged bouts of unemployment.
“I don’t get it,” I say, confused. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Well, Roxana,” he says, sounding pleased, “I thought you could give our readers a few tips for staying positive while lingering, jobless and forgotten, in the breadline!” He looks at me triumphantly.
“Me?” I say incredulously. “Me? I can’t even be counted on to find my own tadasana.”
Lat narrows his eyes menacingly. “Look,” he says bluntly, “you seem pretty chipper at the moment, with your ponytail and your … your … flip-flops.” He looks at my feet accusatorily. “Between your own experiences and the advice people have given you, you must know something about how to keep your spirits up.” When I don’t answer, he snatches the coffee cup out of my hand. “Get cracking, sister,” he says sternly. “or you can go home and drink Crystal Light.” I cower, aware that he is still holding the pruning shears. “Five tips, Roxana,” he says. “You can do it!”
As I make my way home, thinking about the task at hand, I realize that the difficult part of my assignment is not coming up with five tips; on the contrary, the hard part will be narrowing the wealth of my received wisdom and personal experiences down to a mere five items. Ha! I tell myself. I’m being positive already!
1. Find Your Giovanna: Unemployment has many dark hours, in which you may feel like a miner, trapped and forgotten after the mine collapse: you are alone, unsure how to find your way out, and no one is looking for you. In these moments, it is easy to give in to isolation, if only to spare your friends and family from an experience that feels too unpleasant to share. This is precisely why you need a Giovanna – a friend with whom to share your day-to-day travails.
While you will, undoubtedly, have friends who check in on your progress occasionally, it is crucial to confide in someone regularly. Why, you ask? Because, honestly, most of us can’t handle talking about unemployment all the time, and the thought of bringing friends up to date can be exhausting enough to act as a strong disincentive. You need a friend who is generally aware of your progress, so that you don’t have to provide backstory every time you need to talk. Trust me: you need to make it as easy as possible to reach out. Just recently, I called Giovanna after a particularly stinging rejection, and within two minutes found myself sobbing about my dashed hopes. Not having to explain the events leading up to my tearful call: priceless. (P.S. Get your own Giovanna. Mine’s busy.)
2. Be Like a Rolling Stone: No, friends: I am not suggesting that you should be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown; neither do I mean to imply that you should embrace tight pants and heroin. I mean that you should keep moving, no matter how blue you are or how pointless it feels. Whether you run, bike, swim, or play badminton with friends, staying active will help you stave off insanity like nothing else. There will be many days when your job search leads you nowhere, and your best efforts fail to yield results. Even on these days – or especially on these days – you can still pride yourself on accomplishing something if you make it to the gym, or some facsimile thereof.
3. Help! You have time on your hands; make yourself useful to people who don’t. Since arriving in the breadline, I have tried to do for others what work did not previously allow me to do. Although I can’t claim to have done anything heroic, I have (for example) driven friends to the airport, done a fair amount of dog-sitting, house-watching, and errand-running, and helped several people move. Remember that working full time makes us busy and being busy makes us selfish, if only by necessity. Use this (relatively) unencumbered time to repay the many small kindnesses that have been (and will be) afforded to you. Just try to keep in mind, as you do, the importance of knowing how to give with an open hand. Specifically, time is a luxury you now have; do whatever it is you do for the pure sake of doing it – because you can — and expect nothing in return. The satisfaction of making someone else’s life easier, even in small, temporary ways, will make you happy. I promise.
4. Swallow Your Pride, But Keep Your Boundaries: We’ve talked about the importance of being open about your employment situation (or lack thereof), but it bears repeating, especially as weeks turn into months in the breadline. You’re bound to meet new people, and, sooner or later (though usually sooner), new people say “So, what do you do?” If you let people know you’re unemployed, you will probably save yourself from a concentric round of questions about where you work and what kind of law you practice. Having said as much, announcing that you’re out of work can open the floodgates: friends and strangers alike have, at times, bombarded me with oddly aggressive questions about my financial state, my job search, and my career aspirations, complete with unsolicited advice and free-flowin’ judgments. It’s okay to say “I don’t really want to talk about it right now,” or “I don’t actually know when I’ll find another job,” or, if all else fails, to look off into the distance and pull the old, “Is that an extremely rare black-faced spoonbill?” It will provide you with the momentary distraction you need to wriggle away from conversational discomfort.
5. Easy Does It: Ah, if I had a dollar for every time I berated myself for my unemployment-related failures … work would be rendered superfluous. I didn’t spend the last six months teaching myself Arabic, figuring out how to change my transmission fluid, or training for a marathon. I spent money when I swore I wouldn’t. I haven’t been to all the museums I never had time to visit. My library books are overdue.
Many friends have reminded me that unemployment is, of course, not an unplanned vacation, and its circumstances are not necessarily conducive to crossing things off your “To Do” list or undertaking a rigorous course of self-improvement. As Elie told me many months ago, no one thinks that they will be unemployed for three months, or six months, or longer; you live day to day, certain that it will soon be behind you. Most people don’t organize their stint in the breadline around long-term plans, based on a vague notion of what they could accomplish if they had six months in which to do it.
So, friends, I will pass the collective wisdom of my friends and acquaintances on to you. Go easy on yourself. Do as much as you can, but keep in mind that, when ambient stress is your constant companion, you may not have the mental capacity to face, or take on, challenges the way you otherwise might. Enjoy the occasional indulgence, like a pedicure or a cup of coffee from Starbucks; spend as much time as you can with people who make you laugh; and, every once in a while, hunker down and watch bad TV.
Someday, we’ll wake up, startled to find Auntie Em, Uncle Henry, Professor Marvel, Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory standing beside our beds, smiling. Auntie Em will say, “There, there, lie quiet now. You just had a bad dream.’ “No,” you’ll insist, “it wasn’t a dream — it was a place. They called it ‘the breadline,’ and you — and you — and you — and you were there.”
Readers: What advice or tips would you offer to those of us in the breadline?
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Roxana St. Thomas is a laid-off lawyer living in New York. You can reach her by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook. And check out the Notes from the Breadline t-shirt store here.
Earlier: Prior installments of Notes from the Breadline

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