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During my decade-plus stint at my old job, there was a mounting fear, one that would creep up on me at movie screenings and at film festivals—a shiver of dread suddenly cooling a warm Cannes night, something sharp and frightening glinting ominously in Park City snow. It was the conviction that when my miraculous ride inevitably ended, I’d have no idea who I was. Or, really, that I wouldn’t be anybody at all. I had been warned, had warned myself, have warned others to not let careerism grab hold too tightly, to try to make life and work as separate as they can be. But that is awfully difficult, especially when your work is something you love to do, and it involves creativity and subjectivity, and it is rarefied—hard to obtain and hard to hold onto. 

I am probably guiltier than most people of starting conversations with strangers with, “What do you do?” Not because I ever wanted to brag about myself, about the fancy magazine I worked for, but because to me the answer to that question was the quickest route to definition; I thought it explained a lot about a person in easy to parse shorthand. And thus the more I thought that of others, the more I thought it about myself. Yes, I had my private little passions, my quotidian habits that were not reflected in my professional output. But so much of me was my job, for a very long time. 

In my defense, I was aware that it was a mistake to be this way, that it was building a sense of self on top of a pretty rickety foundation, one whose integrity I actually had very little control over. I knew that someday something would shift terribly and down I’d go. The prospect was terrifying, almost impossible to actually imagine. And yet I was convinced that it was true. What life could ever await me past this all-consuming, definitional fact of myself, this billboard of my accomplishments that I could point to in my many moments of self-doubt, on the too many nights I spent peering with longing and envy at the Instagram lives of others? At least I had this one big thing, a mark of status and belonging to refer to as proof of something like worth. 

It was surprising, then, that on the day it did finally get taken away, the most immediate feeling I had was relief. Partly because there was an acute creative difference between myself and the people running things. But more so because the worst news imaginable (career-wise, at least) had been delivered and there I was, nodding on the Zoom call and asking questions about severance (which certainly helped soften the blow considerably) and then hanging up and texting a few people and realizing that, well, I had not spontaneously combusted or disintegrated into a cloud of atoms. I was still there, still mostly me, albeit now a person who suddenly—for the first time since I was 30 years old, really—had a lot to figure out.