some 'business news'

*and a sale and all sorts of big changes coming soon to these parts

I lost my job last week. In this cursed year, in a summer when the nation is literally shitting itself en masse, I was laid off at 8:30 am on a Tuesday. I showed up for a meeting added to my calendar the night before, a meeting titled “Business News.” I showed up in the little Zoom screen with my go-getter coffee, wearing a crisp button-down and a fresh face of makeup, wondering what this business news could be, not imagining the news had anything to do with me.

The Business News was delivered not by a dispassionate “people officer,” but by an executive in the company I’d never worked with directly but had come to like. From sentence one, I recognized the careful HR script: “difficult business decision,” “reallocation of resources,” “eliminating your position.” By the time she got to “off-boarding paperwork,” I’d already disassociated. I replied with whatever feral-wounded words you say in these situations, stared at her closed-mouthed nodding-sympathy smile, clicked “end.” I’m still stunned.

I was laid off after one of the highest-performing months of my entire career in media. It didn’t matter. Skill and effort and innovation are useless when you’re little more than a line item on a spreadsheet, when there’s a narrative about your value you lack the power to shape.

We want to know why in these situations. I did everything right! The ego needs to better understand how. It’s difficult to grasp just how little in late-stage capitalism is a meritocracy; how much is supremely unjust, out of our control. Last century’s American dream is now a nightmare for most of us. We were raised with a bootstrap ethos that, ever more increasingly, will never bear out.

In the months before I was laid off, I was working so much I developed an eye twitch; the pain from my carpal-tunnel-addled forearms and wrists regularly woke me up at night. Attempting to outrun a lay-off bogeyman and hold onto one of the last full-time positions in my field, I was covering as many bases as I could, trying to sniff out the precise effort that could keep me “safe.”

I was nimbly, adaptably, manically over-producing, tracking all available daily performance metrics in the morning when I woke up and before I went to bed at night, vibe-coding, embracing Claude enough to make myself barf. I was an older dog flexing my experience skills while learning many new tricks, ever-extending my worth. Or so I thought.

me since January

The job began to flood every area of my life. I worked six days a week without fail, regularly putting in 10 hours a day. I took only the most minimal time during a medical crisis involving my kid earlier this year, worked through my father-in-law’s illness and death, through vacations and weekends and holidays, through times I was supposed to be “off.”

I knew better than to exploit my own labor for a corporation’s gain like this. I’d written an entire book eschewing just this type of overwork. But survival has an odd way of overriding wisdom: It’s shockingly easy to betray even the hardest-won boundaries when you’re trying to keep your family financially safe.

As a non-rich person, I’m devastated over losing stable income (and health insurance) in 2026 America, and I’m more than a little afraid. Still, as Rue McClanahan once famously said: Every kick is a boost. Multiple creative projects await in the wings that I’ve been desperate to pursue; foremost, this newsletter, which I have frankly not had the time or mental space to keep up the way I would like, to be writing and recommending and curating at the pace and level I want.

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking (somewhat preliminarily!) about what’s next for Extended Scenes. In the meantime, now through the end of the month, I’m running a 20% off sale — join me in unemployed chaos and at least a smidge of joy?

Thanks so much to everyone for being here and sticking with me all this time.

Now let’s have some fun. xo