One Day We’ll Look Back On This, And It Will All Seem Funny
Life’s been funny lately if your sense of humor happens to veer toward the dark side.
Like, it was objectively funny when I got laid off in June literally minutes after creating a campaign to celebrate my former organization’s “strong company culture” (built around a prestigious “best place to work” award win that I spearheaded), a fact that I decided to memorialize in both a Fast Company essay and LinkedIn post, the latter of which I quoted the closest thing I have to a catchphrase, “One day we’ll look back on this, and it will all seem funny,” a line from one Mr. Bruce Springsteen’s masterpiece Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).
It’s something I believe is true that, in the end, it all comes out in the wash, and even the worst shit can be laughed at someday. If I’m being honest, I also find cruel humor funny—VEEP is currently my most rewatched show for a reason—and truly, no one has a crueler sense of humor than life.
I was laid off on a Thursday. The Sunday after, I had my first freelance piece published in Slate. Slate is one of my favorite publications, and this has been a dream of mine for some time, so of course, I was thrilled. Of course, it also happened after a pretty big and unexpected loss.
The article did well. The editor I worked with said it had an exceptionally high comment-section engagement for their audience, and in an audit I conducted myself, I noticed that I was Slate’s most liked and commented on post on Instagram for June. I looked into this because, buoyed by the piece’s success and the fact that I was newly untethered from employment, I decided to apply for an open Slate staff writer position, which would’ve been a dream job. I convinced myself that I had a pretty good shot at scoring, at the very least, several rounds of the interview process (the older I get, the more I do think having a healthy dose of delusion is pretty healthy), mainly because just a few weeks later, Slate accepted another one of my pitches, this one a take on the monetization of Trump’s assassination attempt that the editor I was working on for this one told me needed to turned around in one day to get out while it was still timely.
Obviously, I told her I had nothing but time at the moment so I could get a draft to her that afternoon, which I did, and like all good editors, she had some suggestions for a pivot, so I pivoted, did another draft, and sent it back to her.
We went back and forth a couple more times, riffing on ideas and directions until I finally looked at a version I was confident would be the final draft. It was exhilarating, and in my mind, it was a preview of how much fun my future as a Slate staff writer would be.
And then—because, of course, there’s an “and then” in this story—I shit you not, I sent her back the final final draft, feeling very satisfied, just seconds before receiving an automated email from Slate’s HR department, a thanks, but no thanks: we’ve received a ton of great applicants, and it’s a competitive field so won't’ be moving forward with your application for the open Slate staff writer position. Again, I had to laugh. I didn’t even get a screening call; despite spending the afternoon I got a rejection working on a Slate piece that went live less than 12 hours later.
You can’t make this up. Someday, we’ll look back on this and laugh…I hope, at least.
You know what else is darkly funny? The first book I decided to read after my layoff was a reread of Broken Harbor by Tana French, a novel that revolves around the murder of an Irish family in which the prime culprit is the…recently laid-off father, which I wrote about and published over on Medium (it’s not about writing so didn’t really fit here, and I pitched the story around to no avail) if you fancy a look.
