Its Been a Month

Its been a little over a month since I had been laid off from my job. I have to say that I'm actually doing pretty well.

I'm not going to lie, the first two weeks were pretty awkward and I was still trying not to overanalyse why I had been laid off.

But now a month later, I'm actually quite relieved and a little more settled into my current unemployment status. The way I see it, my boss actually did me a favour.

I no longer dread having to get up out of bed to face people and their nosy questions. I can go to my former place of work to just workout and not be forced to talk about me.

At the beginning of June, Michael and I had planned to go to Columbus, OH to attend a convention. Well, technically he was attending the convention I was going for moral support. I was a little nervous about going, more so because of my unemployment status. There would be people there that I hadn't seen in a while and others that I would be meeting for the first time.  I didn't really fancy answering the question, "So Jonelle, what do you do?" or the other question we all love to hear "Do you have children".

Aside from getting stranded overnight in Dallas with no fresh set of clothes or toiletries, and having my luggage missing for a couple of hours without anyone at A.mer.ican Air.lines.helping us to recover it, (I will never check a bag in or fly with A.me.ric.an Air.lines ever again) our time in Columbus wasn't half bad...except on the day of the Reunion dinner.

Every year at convention they have a Reunion dinner for the graduates of the college associated with our denomination. For some reason my anxiety was so high I couldn't breathe. I was fearing all kinds of things mostly questions being thrust at me by people I didn't know. Like the "kids question", the "what do you do, Jonelle" question, all of which are safe questions, but not for me.

I could feel the beginnings of a freakout coming on as people I didn't know were arriving in the restaurant.  A handful of people I did know where sitting elsewhere and all the unknowns seemed to gravitate to us.  I tried to calm myself down by reading the dessert menu, which only seemed to make me hungrier.

I did made it to the bathroom before the freakout surfaced and I exploded into tears. I was there in the stall trying to calm myself down, taking deep breaths, and trying to picture myself at my happy place - Disneyland, (which is hard to do when there is Italian music playing the background).

Lucky for us a couple we did know sat in front of us. She and her boyfriend had no idea how much at ease their presence was to us...well to me.

Since being laid off I've decided to focus a good portion of my time to writing. Some of that writing hasn't included my blog (so sorry). Mostly because there are certain topics that I want to write about that I can't include on here and other mini projects that I've started and need to finish before starting a new project. I've decided that if I'm going to seriously focus on my writing I can't be sharing a laptop with Michael, so I'm getting my own laptop. YAY!!!