Can’t and won’t

AMIDST THE UNENDING LAYOFFS and the edicts to use nonsense-making machines, the forced commutes, the increasingly lengthy and arbitrary interview processes, and the retrenchment of already minimal efforts at diversity and inclusion—a question is lurking in the minds of many workers, cautious and careful, afraid to poke its head out of the den it has safely hid in until now, but each day getting a little braver, a little more certain that now is the time: what if I cannot fucking do this anymore?

That question tucks itself in the back of our heads because facing it directly is often difficult and unpleasant. If you’ve built up a good career for yourself but after multiple layoffs and months on the market are finding that all the jobs are terrible, facing that question can feel like being asked to climb a steep cliff face with nothing but your bare hands. You want to throw a tantrum, to demand at least a length of rope—surely that’s not unreasonable. But no rope appears, and you’re left standing there, wondering and seething. It’s not that the question itself is dangerous. It’s the response, the part of you that shouts or whispers or sobs out two horrible but liberating little words: I can’t. Or, I won’t.

The first thing you’ve got to do when those words show up is take some time to really sit with them, to listen and let them move through you, let the knowledge drift across every part of your body, until it’s in your fingers and toes and breath and spirit. Know that the grief and shock of this realization is likely to hit you like a ton of racist executive orders. It hurts, is what I’m saying. But pain is a useful signal: it demands that we slow down, that we attend to it, that we lick our wounds and let time and rest do their work on us.

The second thing is you have to start thinking about what comes next. This isn’t a linear sequence so much as a messy oscillation, moving between grief and imagining, between rest and contemplation, between mourning and experimentation. The good news is there is one tried and true method to work through both, and it’s to talk to your people. Kin, friends, respected elders, current and former colleagues, mentors—all of these people are here to think with you as you both process the loss of something that should never have been taken from you, and begin to build anew among the ruins it left behind. Start talking about what’s on your mind with those who will listen carefully and attentively, and ask them to help you notice what comes up, what thoughts or ideas or desires are just now coming out of the shadows and into the light.

There often comes an immense relief from saying out loud that you may be ready to leave one career behind, that it’s now time to do the difficult work of moving towards something new. Relief and fear, of course—but the latter is your comrade in safely navigating the road ahead, a presence that can keep you on your toes as you venture into unknown and possibly dangerous territory. And once it’s said out loud, some space starts to open up to imagine yourself into: maybe there’s work ahead that gets you away from the desk more often, or work that brings you closer to the kind of people you most enjoy spending time with, or work that makes a better world. Maybe there are also changes that may be less welcome, sacrifices necessary to successfully make it across this terrain: a move to a new city, a trip deferred, time spent mending and repairing instead of buying new. The nature of work under capitalism means there are always costs to making a change, and there’s grief that comes with that too—grief that demands our attention as a precondition of moving itself along.

But it will move along, and you will get through this. And odds are you won’t like every part of the change that you’re going to go through, but if you keep your head up, if you stay focused on what’s important to you, if you keep talking to the people around you and weave trust and love and care among them, you will get to the other side. Maybe it won’t be the future that you once imagined. But your imagination is a beautiful and changeful creature, capable of shapeshifting into new beings you couldn’t have foreseen. Trust that the cautious but curious being that is just now starting to poke its head up will take you somewhere that has life and room for living, room to make a life for every part of you, the wounds and the dreams, the grief and the kinship, the old work and the new.