Last week a fortune cookie told me that opportunity would present itself to me today. Not one to hang all my hopes on cookies, there was still a part of me wanting to believe that there was something good that would come to me today – if not an opportunity, then SOMETHING, ANYTHING. I needed to feel hopeful, I needed to feel less scared, I needed to not be a gigantic ball of stress.

I had woken up on Sunday morning and before I lifted my head from the pillow, my mind was a cycle of things that were wrong, things I needed to deal with and things that will likely soon turn to chaos. In case you had any doubt, it’s an AWFUL way to start your day. I hung on to that feeling most of the day, this negativity and helplessness, waiting for the moment it would pass. It took all day. {The feeling hung on longer than it should have partly because Pumpkin was bitten in the face by my ex-brother-in-law’s dog and so the evening expanded to include a trip to the ER for stitches and antibiotics. It’s another post for another day, for sure – but as a quick note: Any animal bite that breaks the skin requires medical attention. So, y’know. Get on that.} By the time we returned from the hospital, I was met with both carnitas and amazing hugs and the day finished on a good note, but…

I’ve been too cranky. Scared. Stressed. Worried. Uncertain.

So today, I decided I would fight that. I would seek to be positive and I would hang on to hope if I could.

How’s it working out?

Well, I don’t entirely know. I guess… okay.

An opportunity did come my way today. And then I made a phone call to connect with a friend of a friend who may not have opportunities, but insight into the local market. There was a birthday in our department (and treats always make things better, if only temporarily).

It hasn’t felt forced, this attempt to not dwell on the stressful things outside of my control. That was my fear. That fakey-fake “I’m okay-ness” of this mission, well, bah. Fake it til you make it is a valid theory but if I annoy myself than I’ve already kind of blown the mission.

My fortune cookie may be right, maybe it’s not – but today I gave myself a break from wondering how I’ll put things together and instead tried to just focus on what I already have.

It’s good sometimes to put worry on the back burner, even if you (like me!) don’t feel like you have the luxury to do so. Your brain needs a break. My brain needed the break.

One foot goes in front of the other and I’ll deal with things as they come.

Though, I can’t promise I won’t find things to panic about tomorrow.

I’m reasonably sure that there’s never a good time to receive bad news about your job. Even if you just won a Mega Millions jackpot, it might still sting to hear that your job was being eliminated or reduced or any of the industry buzzwords that are used to try to separate business from emotion.

Businesses, no matter what they say, really don’t care about people much. And that’s okay, to a degree. You can’t run a business if you’re too busy staunching the blood from your bleeding heart. I’m not faulting businesses that make the decisions they need to make to keep their business afloat.

(I don’t believe that’s what happened here, but honestly, that’s neither here nor there because it changes nothing.)

While there’s no good time for something like this, I can say with 100 percent certainty: there are worse times than others for something like this to happen.

Right now? Epically bad time for this to happen.

I was told that it typically takes a woman five years to regain financial footing after a separation/divorce. I believe it. Whether or not that’s actually true, it feels like it could be true.

So this is not the time I want my paycheck getting smaller.

—

It is what it is.

In just over a week, my work week will shorten by roughly 10 – 12 hours each week. I am seeking ways to supplement those hours with other work. I am seeking solutions. I am not comfortable with bitching about problems and then making no real effort to fix them. And so, I look.

I am grateful for friends who have not only reached out to me but have reached out to people they know who might be able to help me network and find supplemental or new employment. I am grateful for the “You will be okay” and the “I believe in you.” I am grateful for moments where I forget to be stressed out and moments where I can just let my guard down and cry because I am really stressed out.

I don’t know when it will happen, but I have to believe that a company will see that eventually and realize that I bring a lot to the table and could truly be an asset to them and then offer me some six figure salary to work my marketing mojo (Hey, it’s my day dream… ). It could be Tuesday (like that fortune cookie said) or it could be months from now.

Uncertainty – I’ve never really been a fan of it.

The shock of it has worn off – shock because even though I knew that this day would be coming, until it was actually here, i could always hope that something would change.

And it didn’t and so here I am.

Maybe now would be a good time to start playing the lottery.

Sometime in the past few weeks, Marissa Mayer, the current pres of Yahoo decided to  yank the option for Yahoo employees to work from home. Return to the office, she essentially said, or go work for someone else.

I, like many people, thought it was a ludicrous decision and I’ve been inwardly ragey at Marissa Mayer since, even though I do not (nor do I plan to ever) work for Yahoo.

The resulting dialogue of her decision has gotten all feminist-like and working moms like and family values-ish. I guess that is only natural – and Mayer herself probably didn’t help that perception at all by taking that wicked-fast maternity leave (to each their own, but two weeks? I breezed through pregnancy and delivery and even the hardiest women will experience some shifting as the hormones regulate post pregnancy. Trust me when I say that no one needed to be around me two weeks after I had kids. And frankly, two weeks postpartum? My babies needed me more than any office did.)

But I digress (but clearly, with that side rant, you can see how the conversation goes this way).

The arguments I’m hearing keep centering on work-life balance, parenthood, working moms.

That’s legit.

But that’s not why I disagree with Marissa Mayer.

Because you see, I think that the empty nester or the young college graduate who doesn’t have kids yet, they might want to work from home also. And it’s not necessarily about family, but about productivity and about what makes sense for their jobs. It’s about what makes sense for their personality and work style. It’s about what makes sense and what agreements are made between manager and team member.

I worked remotely for six years following the birth of my youngest daughter – and they way it happened was a flukey weird bizarro thing, yes – but for six years, I thrived, working from a home office. Yes, I was able to work around my family. Yes, I could work a big chunk during the days and then pick up to finish my day once children were tucked in at night. I’m an introvert – I didn’t mind that I wasn’t in a bustling office filled with coworkers (in fact, I’m inherently more productive working from home – even with all the distractions that being home affords me).

As a parent, working from home did benefit me. I was able to save money in childcare, I was able to be more present in the day to day events for both of my daughters.

But make no mistake, my employer benefitted too.

A company relocation out of state is what rendered the telecommuting situation necessary – and by keeping me on board rather than hiring someone new at the new location, they didn’t experience any lag in service because I was able to keep doing the work. Given that the job focused around websites and digital communications, it lent itself to a remote work style. My employer didn’t have overhead for me – sure, I used a company provided laptop but that was pretty much it.

For the type of work and for the type of employee I am, it made sense. It was a mutually beneficial agreement that served me well and served my employer well.

It was definitely win-win.

And this is where I think Marissa Mayer screwed up.

This blanket “NO REMOTE WORK” policy changes the work situation for a lot of employees. I’m not sure how many people started work at Yahoo with the condition of working from home, but if I were those people? I’d be peeved.

There are indeed people who would take advantage of a telecommuting job situation – those people shouldn’t be allowed to do so. It’s up to the employee and manager to discuss expectations and it’s up to the management to determine that objectives are being met and that the arrangement remains mutually beneficial. When it comes down to the bottom line, HELL YES, Yahoo (and any other organizations) should want the most bang for their buck – they should want to know that their employees are giving it their all, that they’re not loafing on the couch watching a marathon of Friday Night Lights on Netflix.

But – rather than rule it out for everyone, I believe they should assess each situation on a case-by-case basis. Let each manager work with their telecommuting employee and set goals and objectives. Let that manager gauge each individual situation. Adjust as needed.

As a remote worker, I worked harder than I ever have in my life – because I felt I was battling this stereotype that I was at home being lazy. I worked hard to constantly keep myself visible, present and prove that I was still there and I was pulling my weight, even if I was doing so while wearing pajamas and fuzzy slippers.

Mayer argues that the change is about communication and collaboration. At any given moment, I can think of a handful of methods that can be used to contact me – including but not limited to: Skype, email, text/iMessage, phone, gChat, FaceTime. Documents can be scanned. They can be emailed. I can throw them in Dropbox. There are apps that can be used. Basecamp is also great.

I have had better collaborative work relationships in some cases with people across the country that I’ve never even met than with people I passed in the halls daily. Distance never hampered communication or the ability to collaborate.

I don’t think the focus on working parents belongs here – though I am certain that many work-from-home parents were negatively impacted by the decision at Yahoo. I think the discussion, instead, should center on employee satisfaction and productivity and how people don’t necessarily thrive in cookie cutter situations. Happy employees are more productive, plain and simple. Employers shouldn’t shut those avenues down completely if they can help it.

With any organization, there are jobs that don’t lend themselves to a work-from-home situation. That could well be the case at Yahoo. But by putting the kibosh on all at-home work situations, Marissa Mayer scored a big thumbs down in my book. I imagine she has quite a few unhappy employees, and I realllllly don’t blame them.

It’s Friday night and I am alternately watching the dog contort himself to sniff his backside and mindlessly singing along to “Besame Mucho” which is what shuffle has decided would be next for my listening pleasure. I’m not fluent in Spanish, and haven’t used it in quite a long time – so you can imagine how the singing is going.

I’m fine if I don’t think too much – my sister was over earlier and we were talking about work. I haven’t seen her in awhile, and so I was explaining that I have about six weeks left of full time work. I explained that I have quite nearly exhausted the available options right now for next steps {Paused writing this post to return an email. And now I have quite nearly exhausted every option. One more email to write.} I could feel my eyes starting to fill up with stupid tears while I was talking to her – changed the subject, swooped up my niece, and tried to re-focus my thinking elsewhere.

It’s Friday and a weekend is here and oh, I am so relieved for a weekend – but that means that another week has swooped by and oh, they can’t all go by this fast.

I feel my brain getting caught in the hamster wheel and it’s the thinking that stresses me out and I really need to stop thinking.

I came home from work, pushed myself hard on the treadmill. The exertion felt good – something tells me that this is a far better use of my anxious energy than staring at the wall thinking of every worst case scenario (one train of thought today had me and the girls living in a refrigerator carton on the side of a road somewhere – a ridiculous thought, because even if things ever got that bad, cardboard living isn’t in the cards because there are other options). But that’s how my brain goes.

I hate my brain sometimes.

The same brain that gives me creativity and words and vision – the things about me that I love because I am creative can just as quickly be things that bring me misery because that imagination is an equal-opportunity imagination.

I keep thinking that writing it down, that blogging it will help. That getting it out of my head and out into the ether takes it from being some concept that keeps my brain churning and forces me to realize that it’s either not so bad or it is but that it won’t be so bad always.

Am I calmer now having written? Maybe.

The dog is no longer chasing his butt.

Shuffle is now playing The Civil Wars.

I am thinking of curling up in bed, seeing how many episodes of Breaking Bad I can watch before my brain gives up on me. There is nothing I can do right this minute to alter my situation. Absolutely nothing. (Unless you’re reading this and have taken pity on me and want to hire me to write everything for you ever.)

That’s what I have to remember. There’s worry – reasonable and irrational. And it just doesn’t make sense to let my brain run away with me right now.

I think I may have just talked myself out of my tree.

For now.

Last week, I learned that my job would ultimately be transitioning to part time.

The implications of this, as you can imagine, have got me feeling all kinds of ways about things – life things, financial things, “who did I piss off in a past life?” things. There is no ideal time for plans to get knocked off course, and so it is up to me to deal with it somehow, to find a way to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to hopefully come up with a way to make everything work before everything somehow falls apart.

I don’t love uncertainty.

You know that. If you’ve been around, reading this space for any given time, you know that. You’re certain of it, even.

I am not certain what the answer is.

I am not certain what I’m going to do.

That freaks me out.

All I can do is the best I can do and I struggle with that because the best I can do often doesn’t feel good enough. The best I can do often feels like I’m doing nothing. The best I can do sometimes involves watching Netflix for hours on end until I look at the clock and realize that maybe maybe maybe I should be sleeping.

I look at my bank balance and I wish that numbers didn’t intimidate me. I think I should make budgets and make solutions and possibly clip coupons.

I reprogrammed my thermostat so that as I type this, the temperature in the living room is starting to dip for the night and I am wanting to wrap myself in a throw blanket to keep warm. I’ve read you can save between 1 – 3% on your heating bill for every degree you lower the temperature. That shizz better be true.

But it’s something I can do.

When I feel so stuck and like things are out of my hands, to successfully program my thermostat so that maybe next month my energy bill won’t rival the national debt makes me feel like I’m taking back a little bit of control from my life – my life that seems to be holding the reigns while I am merely along for the ride. To prepare smaller meals to waste less food. To ease up on the Starbucks habit. To pack my stupid lunch every day for work even though I a) hate packing my lunch, b) hate eating what I’ve packed and c) would much rather go out for tacos.

This is not the end of the world. And I am told that everything will be okay (please, keep telling me that. It helps.). It will be. Nothing is as bad as it seems, but it’s all shaded by the color of uncertainty and frankly uncertainty has never made anything look better.

It’s my hope that struggle is temporary.

I’ll keep doing my best.

I’ll keep looking for solutions.

And breathing in and out.

And trying to focus on what is good instead of dwelling on what isn’t.

And I will wrap myself in a thick blanket and keep warm because otherwise my body will turn into a giant icicle because holy moley it’s cold in here.