Meal Plan for the Recently Laid Off

A story about my layoff last year and the meals that did (and did not) get me through it

A year and a few days ago I lost my job. 

I spent a lot of time this month thinking about it. How much can change in a year. How much can change and still kind of stay the same. I did a lot of note-taking and journaling in the weeks following my layoff which means, in my personal mythos, the event is well documented.

I didn’t think I wanted to write something this long about my layoff in my food newsletter because it’s not about food. I was only going to do an intro about my layoff and then get to the food stuff. But, as I was looking back on the notes I realized something kind of strange: I remember pretty much everything I ate in the four-ish days following my layoff.

Why do I remember it all? Well, probably because getting laid off was a really emotionally significant event in my adult life so far. That’s taken a year to admit. I’ve been squeamish to admit how much I was affected by my layoff. Embarrassment is a good word for how I felt. Not necessarily the embarrassment of getting laid off but the embarrassment of how deeply I felt it. How genuinely sad I was. How I genuinely grieved the loss of my job. 

Recording this chronicle of what I ate in those four days is part of how I am now able to admit the level of hurt I felt. I am still a little embarrassed by how much it rattled me but I’m no longer pretending it didn’t. Because, as you will read, this is not a meal plan of someone who was doing fine. It goes without saying but… don’t try this at home.

Day One

Breakfast: Coffee

Lunch: Grocery store sushi, burnt turkey and Swiss croissant

Dinner: Regret

It was a workday. A Wednesday. A lighter day in the office, not too much going on. Normal for the few weeks at the end of the spring semester. 

I went to my desk (which post-COVID is just my kitchen table) and did my usual morning routine. Checked my email, looked through my Asana board, tried to plan out the day. Meeting at 10:30. Therapy at 11. No meetings the rest of the day. Nice.

Overcast weather, a little on the chilly side but humid. The temperature was, in theory, perfect but opening the window made the apartment feel like the inside of an empty bag of Lays. 

At my 10:30 meeting, I’m informed that my “position has been eliminated”. There was an organization restructure and I am superfluous. My last day is today. My Slack and my email, hovering behind the Zoom window, deactivate what feels like seconds after I’m told to pack my knives and go.

This was a job that I’d been at for about five years. It was my first job out of college, my first Big Girl Job™ if you will. It was also a job that I, admittedly, was pretty unhappy at. I’d been job searching for the past four months trying to move on. But as I was being told that I was losing my job I was a wreck. I cried, I am almost certain that I yelled.

I hold a lot of emotions in my stomach. Anger, anxiety, sadness, grief… they’re all stored in the same place I’m supposed to be turning calories into energy. When I get upset, the feeling I get is like when you eat too much at a party full of finger food. Nothing you put in your body individually was all that heavy but it piles up and weighs you down. It’s so much nausea as it is heaviness, the feeling of being too full.

I put on some shoes and I left my apartment and I walked for two and a half hours—just aimlessly wandering my neighborhood. After about an hour I got a text message from one of my colleagues. He and I had the same music taste and sent each other playlists via Slack. He texted and said that he had gone to send me a playlist (The Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Soundtrack, classic) and saw that my Slack was deactivated. 

His text was so kind and so wholesome that I had to sit down. Well, probably also because the only food in my system was a cup of coffee. I sat on a bench in a park I’d never been to before and got to work telling people what had happened. I’d already called my mom and my sister and I’d already talked to my therapist. But, now I started sending texts to friends. 

There was something embarrassing about grieving the job. I had been at the company for close to five years but was, admittedly, very unhappy. And I was someone who prided themselves on the work-life balance. It was just a job and it was kind of a bad one at that. Losing it wasn’t a huge deal, losing it didn’t mean much, losing it was probably more blessing than curse. 

After sending my texts I continued walking for another hour and then decided I should eat something and wandered in the direction of a grocery store. Bear in my mind, even though it’s nearly 2:30 pm and I haven’t eaten anything all day I am very much not hungry. But I am about to pass out so I set off to find something to eat.

One of the best ways to eat when you’re not hungry is to eat food that you like. So, I wander over to a Yes! Organic Market which is not a store I usually go to. The selection, especially at this particular one, isn’t great, the bread’s very overpriced, and for some reason, it’s always eerily empty. But I was literally about to fall over and for some reason Trader Joe’s just felt like it would cause me psychic damage at this moment.

Two of my favorite foods are a warm croissant dipped in a hot cappuccino and sushi. Not necessarily together but those are both things that bring me joy. Yes sells a mediocre version of both of those things. So, I went to the Yes and I bought a plastic container of Tuna nigiri and avocado rolls, a turkey and Swiss croissant, and a cold can of La Colombe oat milk latte. 

I took it all home and ate the sushi immediately. The rice was a glob with no discernible textures and the tuna a soft meat-like hunk that tasted of the faint memory of a fish. On the scale of grocery store sushi, this is actually somewhere near the higher end of the scale. All in all, satisfied if not blown away. 

It’s getting towards the end of the workday which, I presume, is when the company starts notifying the staff that there have been layoffs. Documents acquired tell me that this was communicated in a very truncated Zoom call and then a very long email. I and the three other laid-off colleagues are given a mention in a paragraph toward the end that thanks us for our service. So, now that it’s public, I am getting inundated with text messages from colleagues. 

Mostly disbelief and confusion. Lots of heart emojis. And it’s nice, it is. But it’s also dissonant. It’s a reminder that you can do everything right and still fail. You can be liked and valued and cherished for your humanity and personhood and you can still lose your job. That’s not the narrative any of us want for ourselves. We all want to do the right thing and be rewarded. Is doing the right thing its own reward? Sure. Does that mean much when you’re out of a job? Not really.

All I wanted was the joy of melted Swiss cheese so I put the croissant in the toaster, got distracted by my despair, and burnt it until it was nearly ash. 

For dinner, I ate the sense memory of a turkey and Swiss croissant and feasted on my regret and anger at my overzealous toaster oven.

Day Two

Breakfast: Coffee, phone calls

Lunch: Sunshine

Dinner: Pizza

There’s a liminal quality to waking up without a job. Especially after a few years of working from home, my apartment was not just my apartment it was also my office. The place I’d been laid off was literal arm’s reach from my bed. So, in a way, it was sort of like getting fired and then sleeping on the couch in the office that’s no longer yours. Like waking up in your own home to find that a new family moved in overnight. You have to jump back into the clothes from yesterday and slip out before they come back from the market.

Coffee. I make a coffee despite the fact that I’m in actual physical pain in my stomach. My body is in agony from the intense emotions of yesterday and probably the physiological hunger that I was not attending to. You know how sometimes you’re so hungry, it starts to feel like nausea? Yeah, that’s about where I’m at.

I make more phone calls. Checking in with my mother, my sister, my friends. I’m trying really hard to relax. Jumping straight back into the job market wasn’t a good idea—I was in an intense state of grief and needed time to let it pass. Still, I want to do something to feel proactive about my newfound unemployment. I call unemployment and sit on hold for two cups of coffee and then give up.

At lunch, I make a plan to go get an actual treat meal. But the anxiety about my finances gets the better of me and I collapse in the grass at the park two blocks away. I lie in the sun for a few hours with no book or music or even a blanket to sit on. I just lie there eating my thoughts raw, chewing their tough fibers and veins of undigestible fat. It gives me a stomach ache.

My friends, bless them, come together and Venmo me money to virtually take me out to dinner. What can I say? The brand is strong, these people know me. 

I order my favorite pizza in D.C and try to watch a movie but don’t get very far before dozing off on the couch. 

Day Three

Breakfast: Coffee (with milk), toast, questionable jam

Lunch: Starbucks, a bag of Smartfood popcorn, half a Ben and Jerry’s

Dinner: More regret

I’m trying really hard to sleep in during these post-layoff days but I’m not really a sleeping-in kind of person. I wouldn’t call myself a “morning person” I’m just a person who is too anxious to sleep past 9. 

Another cup of coffee and this time something comes over me and I put milk in it. I am not usually a milker of coffee in most scenarios, I am especially not a milker of coffee at home. But there’s milk in the fridge and something calls to me and wants me to make today’s coffee the least obtrusive experience possible. I don’t want to taste anything, I just want to smell coffee and be in community with coffee and take in the essence of coffee without actually tasting it. 

I decide to make a real breakfast since my body is in desperate need of complex nutrients. I made some toast and put some butter and jam on it. The jam I had in the fridge was… questionable. It was old enough that I could consider throwing it a birthday party. How long can you keep jam that’s been opened? The expiration date almost always refers to an unopened container, not an opened one where the rules become completely different.

Smell test, I hear you say. Yes, I do subscribe to the smell test: if it smells fine it probably is fine. But let me tell you I smell test things and I have almost no idea what I’m looking for. Sure, if there were mold growing on the jam I would smell it, but what’s the difference in smell between moldy jam that’s going to give me botulism and slightly stale jam? I have no clue.

Still, I’m eating the jam because it’s the closest thing I have to a fruit.

Let’s go to the grocery, shall we? Let’s go do a low-lift task that will mentally occupy an hour of the day. In fact, let’s draw this out. Let’s go to the Target across the river to do our shopping. Actually, let’s go all the way to the Target in the suburbs. Let’s go to a Target that’s far enough outside the city that the parking doesn’t require me to take. a validation ticket the size of a box top that I have to protect like it’s a child to make it out alive. Why not? It’s not like I have a job or something.

At the store, I do my usual food shopping. I pick up a case of polar seltzers because seltzer is good for nausea or something, right? I also buy a new set of kitchen towels because you can never have enough. I restock my supply of Altoids. You might not know this about me but I’m very self-conscious about my breath because I was bad at brushing my teeth as a child. I also get a seasonal summer iced coffee from Starbucks. 

When I get back from the store, I throw myself into some culinary tasks. First, I do what I usually do which is take all the meat I bought out of its packaging and repackage it into portion sizes that I can individually freeze. Then I prep a little appetizer for the barbecue I’m going to tomorrow. I toss some shishito peppers in olive oil, salt, and pepper and throw them under the broiler—a great finger food for any gathering, also easily done on the grill. 

I then spend three hours prepping some mirepoix (the onion, carrot, and celery base of so many European soups and stews) that I’m going to freeze in individual portions. Not really because I need to but because it feels like a reasonable use of my time.

Now, I have dinner options galore, I just went to the store, and I have chopped at least six cups of mirepoix. I am lousy with options of what I can make for dinner. I’ve spoken about how this newsletter, in a broader sense, is about reclaiming the act of making dinner from all the forces that make it so gosh darn hard. How we can turn our Sisyphean task into a source of joy and liberation. 

Instead, I crack open a bag of Smartfood popcorn, eat about half of it while watching YouTube videos, and then half hour later I open one of the Ben and Jerry’s pints and do about half of that. I head back over to the couch to try and fail, once again, to watch a movie. This time I manage to get myself into bed to sleep.

Day Four

Breakfast: coffee (no milk), scrambled eggs, and buttered toast

Lunch: Barbeque with friends 

Dinner: Tuna, crackers, lettuce

Saturday. A day that equalizes me, the unemployed, with the employed masses. Today is a day I’m not supposed to have a job, I’m not supposed to be anywhere but enjoying one of the two agreed-upon leisure days they give us. 

This morning, I can tell I’m getting better because I do coffee and breakfast at the same time instead of doing them an hour apart. I make an espresso since, despite how much I’ve slept, I feel like I haven’t slept in days. My stage of coffee dependency is such that caffeine doesn’t do all that much for me anymore but an espresso can still get the heart rate going. 

While the espresso brews, I make a plate of scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs are something I grew up eating when I wasn’t feeling well. Anytime I told my mom I had a stomach ache she would make me a plate of eggs and some buttered toast¹. To this day, I always make scrambled eggs when I’m not feeling well and I am not feeling well this morning.

After I have my eggs I go over to my friend’s place for a backyard barbecue. This group of friends I’m meeting for this barbecue happens to be the group of friends I made while working at the job that laid me off. At this point, none of them work there anymore, I was the final holdout. They were some of the first people I texted when I got the news, they were the ones who Venmoed me money for pizza.  

Here we are circa 2018/2019 with the only King of England that matters to me.

I was told before entering the workforce that I should keep my work life and my home life as separate as possible. I was told not to make friends with the people I worked with because that was bad or something. But, I was new to the city and I didn’t have friends and I was spending forty hours a week with my colleagues. And, suddenly, people were asking me to do things. Inviting me to go to the movies, to go to bars, to see concerts. We were going to lunch together, commiserating about our jobs where we were underpaid and overworked. Before long I was being invited to their homes, learning the intimate details of their lives, going on trips, getting invited to weddings. 

That was probably why it hurt. That job was my early 20s. That job was the transition from college kid to actual person. That job was where I found community. That job was where I took a leap and landed on my feet. And instead of strutting out the door wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette as the building burns behind me… I got let go over Zoom. There was no celebratory goodbye happy hour where I got to say my farewells and have a last moment in the sun. 

I like endings. When I was a kid I used to go to bookstores and read the last lines of books. Books I had no intention of reading. But I just loved reading endings. The ending was always the best part. With a good ending, something clicks into place, something settles, something releases. Endings are so powerful and so meaningful to me. But, at this job, I didn’t get an ending. Even though it was a job I didn’t really like, I wanted it to have an ending. Instead, like a beloved but underperforming TV show, I just got canceled. The final threads are all still hanging there and they will stay there, forever. 

We grilled, we laughed, we blew up a tiny little swimming pool that we only managed to fill with a few inches of water. We blew bubbles and one of my friends climbed a tree and we drank Topo Chico hard seltzers and no one ate my shishito peppers because no one there liked shishito peppers. And I ate most of them because I love shishito peppers and I wanted to find the spicy one in the pile. 

It is a good ending to this article if I say that it was at this barbecue that I found peace. It’s very tidy: me, in that yard, looking at the sky and realizing it was all going to be okay. Me, looking around and nodding thoughtfully as I muse that the real adventure was the friends I made along the way. 

But, it didn’t end at that barbecue. It didn’t even really end when I got another job offer a little over a month later. The first three months at my new job were very characterized by a profound sense of anxiety about myself and my work. Even now I’m still a little bitter I never got that ending. A normal person would let it go but none of us are normal people, are we? I, as most people would, will probably have this bitterness somewhere in the back of my mind for the rest of my life.

And I will probably always remembers these meals. I will especially always remember that burnt croissant because nothing exemplified that first day quite like it. 

I get back from my friends and I’m not too hungry since we had so many snacks and libations at lunch. I have some tuna salad that’s a few days shy of retirement, some crackers, and some crispy-leaf lettuce.

A good ending to this article would be that my life is significantly better now than it was last year. I’m at a different job now where I make more money but not a lot more. I do a lot of the same work, I have slightly more responsibilities, the workplace is a healthier environment but it’s offset by the job being a little more demanding. I have had days where I went and got the Yes Market sushi again. I have burnt more things in that toaster. I have had more mornings where I ate coffee and didn’t eat breakfast. 

But I don’t remember any of them.

1. Do other people do this, by the way? A lot of people are confused when I tell them that this was what my mom gave me when I was sick. Most people tell me that they got ginger ale and saltines when they were sick. I have a passing theory that this is culturally a Jewish thing but my sample size is small. Let me know if you grew up in a scrambled-eggs-while-sick household.