Dominique Browning: How I lost my job and found myself
For more than a decade, she was a high-flying magazine editor. Then one Monday, the title closed and she found herself out of a job, single and feeling anxious, listless, and strangely hungry. One woman's honest and provocative account of building a new life from the ruins
For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of the US edition of
House & Garden, a magazine that celebrated the good life. It would be an understatement to describe this enterprise as part of a company not primarily in the business of philosophical, spiritual or moral soul-searching. Condé Nast's roots and branches are in the material world. The good life at
House & Garden generally meant cultivating your own backyard rather than being involved in the body politic. I pushed against the limits of making a so-called shelter magazine by publishing articles about spiritual issues and the environment, but I always felt clear-eyed about how things stood. I spent more than a decade in the belly of the beast of muchness and more. That was a precarious place to be when the property bubble began to leak.
The folding of the magazine was ruthless. Without warning, our world collapsed. No one was expecting it: I came to work on a Monday in 2007, went to the corporate offices for a meeting, had a different meeting, got the news and was told to have everything packed up by Friday. Security guards were immediately posted by the doors.
In the four days we were given to pack up our belongings, I was overwhelmed with an urge to hoard, and began stuffing every
House & Garden paper bag, pencil and notepad I could get my hands on into a box, so that I'd never run out of office supplies. I salvaged enough to run a small corporation from my kitchen. I didn't think of this as stealing. I thought of it as a twisted sort of recycling – part of the strange new economy of severance into which I had been thrown. Everything with our logo on it was destined for the dustbin anyway.
Even so, a few weeks later I realised I had some gaping holes in the inventory: I had no ink for my printer. The pages of my résumé looked faded, ghostly. You would think I was fading, too, but I wasn't. I was getting plump. All I could think about was food. This was the beginning of being hungry all the time. My addled brain interpreted the white noise of unemployment to mean that I was going into hibernation, that I had to lay in reserves. After the closing of the magazine was announced, my public line was, "We had a great run, we took a magazine from zero to 950,000 readers in 10 years, fabulous renewals, we won awards, published six books…" I was a zombie. "Great run… 950,000 readers… six books…"
But privately, I was in a whiplashing tailspin. My nightmare had finally come true. For years, I had a profound dread of unemployment that went way beyond worrying about how to pay the bills. I would like to say that this was because of the insecure nature of magazine publishing, but my anxiety had more to do with my own neuroses – though I didn't think of it that way. Work had become the scaffolding of my life. It was what I counted on. It held up the floor of my moods, kept the facade intact. I always worried that if I didn't have work, I would sink into abject torpor.
I have always had a job. I have always supported myself. Everything I own I purchased with money that I earnt. I worked hard. For the 35 years I've been an adult, I have had an office to go to and a time to show up there. I've always had a place to be, existential gravitas intended. Without work, who was I? I do not mean that my title defined me. What did define me was the simple act of working. The loss of my job triggered a cascade of self-doubt and depression. I felt like a failure. Not that the magazine had failed – that I had.
The thing about running a magazine is that there is always too much to do. I liked not being in control of my time – I was always busy. I didn't want time to think things over, things like feeling guilty about spending more time with my office mates than with my children; feeling sad that those children were leaving home; or feeling disappointed in love or frightened by terrible illness. Everything else, in other words. The demands of my job kept me distracted. Besides, no one else was paying my mortgage. With the closing of the magazine, my beloved family of colleagues was obliterated. And so was the structure of my life.
Within hours of leaving my office for the last time, I could hardly bring myself to care about my reputation. I just wanted to eat. I began calling every employed person I knew to take me to lunch. I wanted to fill my calendar with the promise of meals. Only food could ward off the rage, despair and raw fear that overcame me.
How had I managed to get this far in my life completely unprepared for the unknown – which I had always known was out there?
