tigerrouge
don't look down
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2005
- Messages
- 18,289
- Reaction score
- 8,091
The Daily Mail reports on life after the axe:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...ust-lose-job--lost-pride-self-esteem-too.html
Dumped! Ex-magazine editor Louise Chunn didn't just lose her job - she lost her pride and self-esteem too
02nd June 2009
As I peered at my face in the mirror I knew that, objectively, it didn't look any different to the way it had for the past few years. But in my eyes, I was no longer the same person. My face, my body, my self had all changed indelibly on the day, last winter, when I lost my job.
One minute I had 40-odd souls under my sway and was partly responsible for many millions of pounds profit, the next I was walking up Oxford Street like a zombie, my office life waiting to be packed into boxes by my PA and taxied to my home. Of course, I am only one among tens of thousands suffering similar fates as the economic downturn hits this country, but still, I have to tell you, it felt really bad.
I had spent more than 25 years in magazine and newspaper journalism in London, but I liked to think I had always kept the Bigger Picture in mind. Interesting work was always more important to me than money or title; status-mongering colleagues who insisted on special treatment struck me as faintly ludicrous. I was the down-to-earth one of whom one boss had written 'she is not troubled by ego'. I had won awards and was head-hunted from one job to the next - but I genuinely believed that I had also kept it all in perspective.
Hah! The past few months have taught me that you don't really know how you value yourself until the carpet is pulled from under your feet and you can imagine the whole world talking about your pratfall. I had lost a job before - it happens in the senior echelons of the media - but I was completely unprepared for this one.
Being at home with my husband, children, even Snowy the incredible moulting cat, was a definite improvement on what had become a grinding way to earn a living. But still, I found daily life without the structure of work simply bizarre. I cleared out the basement in the first week, baked batches of cookies in the second, then couldn't think what to do with the third.
People who I didn't know terribly well but had at some point in their careers suffered a similar fate all got in touch, took me for a drink or a slap-up lunch. Most importantly, they told me that I mustn't allow myself to feel a failure. I nodded sagely, but I couldn't even breathe properly, let alone come out with a beaming smile. I wondered if, at the age of 52, I would ever learn to cope with the humiliation.
But never mind how I felt - as the days and weeks passed, I began to realise that losing my job was having a dramatic impact on how I looked, too. Strangely, at first it seemed to have a rather good effect, in the way that the adrenaline rush of a tumultuous love affair can leave a woman looking fabulous when actually she resides in hell. It didn't matter whether I was makeup-less and dress-down-every-day at the school gates or swanked up for a meeting in the West End, everybody went on about my 'radiance'.
That was not a word that had been used about me in a while. The stress of the previous months' mounting tension had, on particularly bad days, manifested itself in bags under my eyes, hunched shoulders, and a general lack of fizz, so there must have been an improvement.
I lapped up my friends' compliments and resolved to spend more time - now that I had it - on my appearance. I rushed to book facials and massages to help me look 'better' (ie younger). They made no discernible difference. I've had a personal trainer twice a week for some years - we run around the local park together and do various other exercises - but had always pined to find the 'me time' to really get into yoga.
But, even so, I couldn't just switch gears from being an institutionalised corporate beast to a free agent, with all the flexibility that entailed. I think I was so overwhelmed by the fear of an uncertain future that I couldn't relax. Given so much more spare time, I put it to often ludicrous use, fussing over my appearance. I even started to doubt the wisdom of my signature hairstyle - short and silver-blonde, swept over the forehead in a vain attempt at Agyness Deyn funkiness.
My long-time hairdresser Richard supported my decision to ditch the obvious 'anti-ageing' formula of caramel and blond chunks. Instead we let my grey (which had been encroaching since my early 20s) come through with just a little peroxide. But while it was all very well to imagine I was channelling Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, that kind of hauteur only worked so long as I had a grand job, too.
When you leave the house not to run a magazine but drop an eight-year-old at school then come back home and unload the dishwasher, looking soignee isn't required or desired. Was the new, kicked-in-the-teeth me more like 'geography teacher grey' than 'glamorous grey'? I determined to discuss a solution with Richard, when I turned up for my next appointment, a couple of weeks after the axe had fallen. We've known each other for 20 years and can easily spend an hour talking and laughing about life. But, in my free-fall, I couldn't even open my mouth. He smiled gently, and said: 'So are you going to tell me?' He'd heard - everyone had heard! - but he never thought that job was good enough for me anyway. As for my 'youthifying' my hair colour, he batted away my neurotic twitterings. 'It suits you like this, doesn't matter what job you do, or don't.'
I felt quite a lot better after that little pep talk. And then there was the issue of clothes. Because I have worked in and around the fashion end of the media for 25 years, I have over time built up a rather nice wardrobe. I shouldn't brag, but I do I have four Prada dresses, two Alexander McQueen jackets, and a beautiful white leather Burberry trench.
Especially in the job before last, when I headed up a purely fashion magazine, it was considered essential that I walk the fashion walk, representing the title and my team. These weren't just clothes, they were the mandatory uniform of a person whose job it was to get other people to believe in their product. For a fashion magazine editor to look less than fashionable would have been like a dentist having rotten teeth. But when you do not have a job, you do not need such things. In fact, they look ridiculous. You may have a wardrobe of beautiful, high-end, designer stuff, but you have nothing that works for daily life.
I might have wanted to wear my chic cream satin Prada coat - but I would have felt a phoney if I had. Who did I think I was? I started to wear a much smaller number of clothes and the only new piece of clothing was a denim skirt from Jigsaw. It's perfectly nice, but also quite dull and I knew it wouldn't do much for my ego.
Two things did help in that area - and they went very well with my denim skirt, actually. The first were a pair of flat black patent Prada boots that I had bought the previous winter. Everywhere I went, they went - and they really worked a treat. From the woman in Sainsbury's who leaned across the screaming tots in the double buggy to say 'Killer boots, lady!, to the men at a publishing party, my boots won me plaudits. Internally, they built me up, made me feel like the original me, without marking me out as too try-hard.
Interestingly, high heels usually had the opposite effect: I felt I couldn't carry them off, didn't have the walk or the presence to justify them under the current circumstances. Hopefully that will pass, as the Rupert Sanderson red patents with the peep-toe and little buttoned strap are just too lovely to be consigned to the back of the wardrobe. But I have started to notice how often women in heels look more worried about getting to their destination without mishap than actually feeling fabulous, so perhaps I'll get along without so many heels anyway.
My other saviour was a bright blue Dries Van Noten coat I had splashed out on in Selfridges in September. A large chunk of me wanted to hide away until I could burst forth into the world with a new identity, but there was still enough of the fighter left in me to want to court some attention. This coat said 'The bastards have not ground me down' and I believed it. As the weeks then months passed, I grew to rather enjoy the sartorial freedom. I can finally get some variety into what I wear and now that I'm used to it, it's a relief, frankly. All that tailoring can start to look a little unwomanly and sexless if you don't watch out.
I also adjusted to my more home-based life. There is no doubt that every last member of my family has benefited from the fact that I do not currently have a full-on, full-time job. Leaving early, arriving home late and tired, trying to catch up with chores, phone calls and emails between a never-ending round of often repetitive and tedious meetings, I wasn't around at all in daylight hours. It's obvious that an eight-year-old would love to see more of Mum (though, good little feminist that she is, she says she does not want me to be a stay-at-home mother for ever); but my older two, who no longer live at home, can always reach me now, and I'm able to help with lifts or advice or a proper meal when they need it, which they still do.
I refuse to feel guilty about the past, but I do have warm and fuzzy feelings about my family (including my parents and brothers in New Zealand, with whom I'm in much more frequent contact) that I cannot consciously remember previously. As my journalist husband works from home, having me there, too, was not initially an easy change for him. He was used to blissful peace and solitude once our daughter and I had left for the day. Now he had a wife who was not only in his sphere - sitting in the room next door - but discombobulated by the implosion of the careerist ideal. I imagine I was something of a nightmare in the bleak, early days, but he never showed it and he always supported me.
I am now carving out a new career as an editorial consultant/ freelance journalist. Who knows how long it will be before I return to the corporate coalface - maybe never, counsel my freelance friends. But I do think my relationships with family and friends should be a little better because I have had more time and energy for them. And, hand on heart, I have got more pleasure from that than any balance sheet.
Probably the worst aspect of being at home is the dreaded middle-aged spread. An obvious effect of not having a job with a strict schedule is that I am perilously close to my kitchen and it is all too easy to self-medicate with comfort cuisine. I have since lost the weight I initially put on, but I don't plan to cut back on lunch with friends. Food is social glue and now that I have more time, I genuinely love seeing people, and especially cooking for them.
So how have I fared in the post-job world? I would say pretty well under the circumstances. Initially I felt very angry and hurt, but not quite devastated. My world was unsteady, but I soon realised that there were; a) a lot of people out there in the same situation, and b) worse things can happen - this was only a job.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...ust-lose-job--lost-pride-self-esteem-too.html
