Day One

While I originally felt relieved to not have to go to a place where it seemed like everyone was against me actually succeeding, this weekend was rough. I stopped focusing on the not having to deal with their bullshit anymore and instead on the being fired. I replayed the moment over and over in my head to see if I could make sense of it. If there was one thing about myself that I was pretty sure of, it was that I am not the type to get fired. I know the type that gets fired: They're impossible to work with or have explosive tempers or sleep at their desk every day or steal the company's projects to sell as their own. You had to do some pretty bad shit to get fired. I had always striven to be the kind of person who no one would consider firing: Working late on ridiculous deadlines, working with project managers when they utterly fail to spec out a project and it's due the next day, being polite to everyone even when they treat me like shit (and then crying in the bathroom), and taking the opportunities I could to hang out and get to know my coworkers at lunch and after work in addition to simply doing my job as well as I could. This weekend I kept struggling with the idea that I got fired. And, while deep down I know there's nothing I could have done to avoid it, I still feel like I've done something horribly wrong. I'd become "one of those people who actually get fired". I'd joined the ranks of the people who got multiple warnings or blatantly violated company policy. Any attempt to claim that I was not one of those people just made it sound like I was trying to spin things.


Everyone says to take time off: my boyfriend, my friends who have been laid off (not fired), my workaholic parents. I don't know if I can. My work was too much of who I am, or I guess, who I was. I need an office to go into every day and projects to work on and problems to solve. I have freelance projects and prospects, sure, but it seems like a cop-out to consider myself a "freelance developer" now.

Because I'm one of those people who got fired. And who the hell gets fired these days??