After being made redundant, Gráinne Patterson wrestled with dread and shame. With New Zealand continuing to experience high unemployment rates, she wonders what’s happening to our collective self esteem, and suggests we rebrand redundancy.
“I can lose my job but no one can make me redundant as a human. No one gets to decide that I’m insignificant. I’m important, I matter.” I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror after saying the words out loud, their echoes bouncing off the toilet bowl, period supplies around me. My reflection, brow arched in judgement, did not believe a word of my mantras.
I tried to hold them in my head anyway as I went into the meeting to hear my role of almost a decade would be made redundant. It was my beautiful, crying manager, who had done everything she could to secure my role, who had to tell me. I passed her the box of tissues she’d brought into the boardroom for me and she apologised, wiping her eyes and saying it wasn’t supposed to be about her. “No,” I replied, “but if you’re going to cry about losing me then I want to see it.” We laughed. I cried a bit too.
I’m definitely one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t fired on a Zoom call along with 799 of my colleagues like what occurred during the P&O debacle of 2022. I was made redundant after every other avenue had been exhausted, with so much care and personal attention that I could barely feel bad about the fact that it was happening. But after I gathered myself, sent the last few emails for the day, and finally got home, I slid to the floor, trying to breathe slowly, to not let the panic rise. I stayed there, gripping the carpet below me until the sun went down and the room was completely dark.
A brutal economy has seen the unemployment rate rise to 5.4% – the highest in the last decade. But I’m worried about more than the numbers. I’m concerned about the inevitable dip in our collective self-esteem when thousands of us are told we are surplus to requirements. It feels fitting that I was made redundant at the same time as reading Michelle Duff’s collection of stories Surplus Women. This idea that there is a right or wrong amount of humans in any given place means looking at people by their quantity first, their humanity second (or never).
The day after being told the news, I awoke feeling barely able to move. Crushing dread and shame pinned me to my bed. I phoned my manager and she instantly encouraged a mental health day. My friend, who had been made redundant six months prior, came over. She was validating and caring, listening to all my fears. But before she left, leaving me with a movie cued up and two cups of tea (one for each hand), she said, “You know, this might be a good thing. Right now, your fear is louder than your self-worth, or the ability to see opportunity in this. But it is there, underneath it all. Things will get better.”
I thought about her words a lot. I imagined my fear, with its megaphone, shouting inside me and drowning out any other thoughts or feelings that might want to rise. I have learned (through copious amounts of therapy) that these things are best dealt with head on, so I decided to zoom in on my fear. I cancelled the movie I was going to numb out to and opened a new tab so I could write myself a letter from my fear, allowing it to articulate exactly what it’s afraid of.
It told me I failed. That I lost my job because I’m lazy, unreliable, irrelevant and bad at everything I’ve ever tried to do. That I’d never be hired again and I’d failed my friends, my family, my education, my potential, as well as capitalism, society and adulting in general. That I’d lost the game and my main mistake was being stupid enough to think I was worthy of playing it in the first place.
Fear ended the letter saying: “The world is dangerous and is becoming more so by the day. You need money to survive. You will be destitute, alone, bald (?!), and unable to retire if you don’t have $1.5m in savings by the age of 65 – that’s just mathematics.”
I walked into Petone and considered carrying on down the motorway, straight to Lambton Quay and begging anyone I saw for a high-paying job to secure my future on this planet. But then I got distracted and stopped off at Te Omanga Hospice shop. I found a denim jumpsuit – long sleeves, short legs – for just $6 and I was healed, for about an hour. Then I got a tiramisu doughnut from Belén Plant Bakery to extend my healing for another hour.
In the bakery, riding the high of sugar and denim, I pulled out my notebook and tried to write a letter from a different part of myself:
“What if it all works out? What if everything you’ve been working towards leads to something. Maybe not in the way you expected, but still, something good. What if this time is an opportunity to reset, to rest, to check if your last job was actually the sort of work you want to be doing? What if you took this time to find a different path, to find the work that is most meaningful to you? Yes, the world is dangerous, but if it continues on this path to apocalypse, money will not be what saves you, it will be connection – with others, with yourself, with meaningful work.”
The original meaning of the word redundant comes from the Latin for a rise in waves, an overflow exceeding what is necessary – an abundance. But redundancy, now, has nothing to do with abundance. It is the bottom of the barrel scrape of scarcity. Is there any way we could reclaim it? Wouldn’t it sound better at parties, when someone asks what we do, to reach for another corn chip proudly and say, “Oh, nothing at the moment, I was recently made abundant”.
If you’re out there and you’ve been made redundant, I hope you’re able to separate your former workplace from your self worth. I hope you can take some time to rest, to think about your next steps and the sort of work you want to do in the world. Or that you have the option, for a moment, to take a break from it all – to fidget spin or have a brat summer or whatever it is the cool kids are doing these days. Mostly, I hope you’re able to move your fear out of the driving seat, place your hands firmly on the wheel and get to choose what direction you drive in next.
