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It’s Not Too Late to be What I Might Have Been
At 41 (almost 42) years old, I crossed the stage this past Saturday at Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center to receive my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Sacramento State. It was the end of one long journey to discover myself and launch forward into a new life dedicated to continuing that exploration. Mine is truly the story of a corporate drone that broke free of the madness.
Rewind back to the end of September of 2021, after nearly 18 months of Covid my job of 12 years scheduled a surprise midday meeting. I knew immediately what it was about and let out a sigh of relief. The company had been struggling, and as the sole events organizer who’d had her events disappear due to Covid and had been literally been working odd tech jobs around the office for a year and a half, I saw it coming from a mile away. I was lucky, I’d watched Covid creep through California for months before the official stay-at-home order of March 19th, 2020. A two-week notice is always nice, but I had the luxury of 18 months of lead time before they finally axed me.
It’s really weird to get fired on your day off, but that’s what happened. I’d scheduled a couple days off to recover from ankle surgery and only vaguely remember the HR lady’s well-practiced speech, launching into some corporate nonsense about Covid restructuring, offering me either a move to some BS job in sales…
