Change is a Controlled Substance

I got laid off on Thursday from a company I’ve worked for and been happy with for about 4 years. It’s not that long in the grand scheme of things but it’s the longest I’ve ever worked for a single employer. I also left my mark in some ways that make me proud, so it was starting to feel like a forever home. Through the years I’ve been shifted to different positions, the most recent being an enablement position that tasked me with proving value to management and justifying the continued existence of a department of about 45 people. The good news, I succeeded and the department was retained. The bad news, they no longer needed a person to perform the work of justifying the department and I was let go along with my director and 2 other support staff.

I’m eligible for rehire and have applied for some positions elsewhere in the company. The idea of getting laid off was in my head already due to poor earnings so I wasn’t too surprised, and I’ve seen it happen often enough in my life that I don’t harbor any ill will toward the business. Sure, they could’ve handled it better, could’ve given me the opportunity to take a new role before giving me the boot. But given that we were recently purchased by a larger company, those kinds of considerations are surely harder to make now. The big impact of this for me, rather than a jarring loss of income or unexpected career turmoil, is an increasingly familiar feeling of loss that punctuates the passing of another major life event unaccompanied by any dramatic or painful emotions. I’ve written about this before, when the job opening for my old dream job at this company was posted. Somehow, that was a prescient topic because it has been my life’s theme for these past couple months.

When that management position opened about 6 weeks ago, I applied and ended up going through the interview process in a somewhat unique way. I have the most experience of any PM in the company with the type of work in question, but I had also left the department over a year prior for a much more impactful and much less stressful position. I made it clear that while I would enjoy returning, I would want compensation that reflected this change in status and stress, and that I ultimately couldn’t guarantee that I’d take the position if my requests were met because I felt very valuable in my new position. It was a position that had been created with me specifically in mind, and I didn’t want to return that gift by going back to my ex the first time she called.

In the end, the hiring manager and I agreed to part ways. My position allowed me to collaborate with his department frequently, so I could enjoy the flexibility of contributing to his team in a less stressful context without disrupting the work I was in charge of in my new role. Additionally, the hiring manager confided that he believed my future prospects could be better if I kept my ties to the management team of my department. Neither of us considered that I might be out of a job if I didn’t switch places. He selected a PM that I had hired a year ago to take the position.

In between these two events, I stopped taking a prescription that I’ve been taking since elementary school. Until Thursday, I thought this would be the big life change that I’d be writing about. For most of my life I’ve taken a dangerous amount of Adderall each morning. While most who use it take between 5 and 15mg, I took 90 a day. As the medically minded of us would suspect, this has had a significant impact on my heart health. But it also allowed me to function properly at school and work, and achieve a number of things that I otherwise would never have had the attention span to see through to completion. If anyone saw the ridiculous list of project ideas I posted called the brain dump, it’s not too farfetched to hear that I’ve had a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Unfortunately for me, it was becoming clear that my time with this drug needed to come to an end. Over the past 4 years I’ve tapered down from 90 all the way to 15, and even as a last resort attempted 7.5 a day. The diminishing returns were obvious, but what’s worse was the persistence of my ever worsening chest pain and anxiety. For about 3 years I’ve felt like I was on the verge of a heart attack at least once a day. Being obese, diabetic, comically sedentary and riddled with other health problems, this seemed like a pretty likely scenario to me, and it played havok with my anxiety. I was on an anxiety medication too, of course, and added in a statin for heart stability when it became pertinent. Initially I started tapering the Adderall because of a shortage, and then because I lost my primary care physician during the pandemic and didn’t want to find another, and then again at the request of a new doctor. I ended up tapering it further because as I was taking less of it, it was getting harder and harder to finish the task of making appointments to get prescriptions written. I ended up stopping the medication to save my last few doses for times when I really needed it, and suddenly my chest pain was gone.

That was the last nail for my relationship with Adderall. I spoke with my doctor about finding non-controlled alternatives and started the chapter of my life without my prescription helper. It proved to be more challenging than I had hoped, as it coincided with my second run in with COVID. The resulting person I became couldn’t stay awake for more than 4 hours simultaneously and had to expend significant effort to stay on track with work. I completed my largest project and decided to take my accrued sick and vacation days to get back to normal. A week after I returned, fresh out of PTO and ready to get back to work, I got the axe.

I wish there was a grand way to wrap this up with a moral and a flourish, but it’s just life. I’m going to be fine. I don’t feel like shit outside of fighting off an illness that was spurred on by the sudden stress release of stopping work. I’m sure eventually I’ll learn to appreciate the hollow vacancy of drama that now accompanies my life changes, but for now I will feel empty and spend my impromptu vacation trying to lose weight full time. If good mental health is about accepting some amount of boredom or malaise instead of panic and insecurity in the face of change, I suppose I’m in a good place.

Next time, Silent Hill comes to the NFL offseason. See you then!