I really thought I was over the quasi-breakdown spirals at the thought of layoffs. There was a time, shortly after I got out of game development, where just reading about layoffs at some game company where I didn’t even know anyone would be enough to slam my stress levels through the roof for the rest of the day. That hadn’t happened in the last couple years of working at MetaBank, or even earlier in the year when my current employer laid off some people in other groups, so I thought I was finally over it.
And then my bug tracker software abruptly stopped working in the middle of a Wednesday morning, and my officemate traced it to my name being mysteriously removed from the users group. Here came the blood pressure spike even as I started making gallows humor jokes about cleaning out my desk.
Logically, I knew I was fine. We’re trying to fill programmer seats in my department, not reduce them. Furthermore, even if I were to be laid off, in the current white-hot economy, I doubt I’d be unemployed for very long. Just the act of posting my previous article about the Iowa Caucus to LinkedIn was enough to put me on the radar of a few recruiters sending availability inquiries.
But still, there was that stress level again, leaving me to try and figure out some coping mechanisms that didn’t require my emotional support motorcycle. Or a long run, since I’d already done that in the morning. Truth be told, it kind of wrecked my day. I can still analyze though, and one of the things I realized is that this is part of what’s driving me towards being debt free. Because if I were writing this now with no debts but our mortgage, and with a three month emergency fund sitting in the bank, it would be a lot easier to smile and crack a few jokes when things get weird in the middle of a week, rather than to start having visions of my world collapsing on me again.
Maybe I really need to give a name to this nonsense and deal with it too. One conversation that I had at PAX South this year with a guy from Checkpoint, a mental health resource focused on gamers and game developers, really resonated with me. So this is me opening up a little and trying to be at least a little bit honest about stuff that’s bothering me.