Having a job was nice.

I have to run a bunch of errands tomorrow, in order to prepare for leaving town. Mostly: dropping off my cousin's Christmas present, packing, doing some last-minute shopping for the road trip, and dropping off my DreamWorks gear at UPS in order to be shipped back. 

And that leads me to all these questions. Should I be canceling certain subscriptions? Do I even buy my Disney World tickets? Do I even deserve to? I registered for the runDisney race well before I got wind of any layoffs. And I just don't know what to do anymore. 

It doesn't feel like a) I actually worked at DreamWorks, and on a film that everyone will see, and b) I lost that job only 13 months after getting it. My second layoff in a row, a 100% layoff rate for all the full-time jobs I have had. I had the opportunity of a lifetime, and it was taken from me. That little Windows ThinkPad with the CentOS machine in the NBCU data center -- I'll never get to use it again. I'll never participate in chats again, or play the stupid daily games, or work on my wiki articles where I was trying to document the entire pipeline with my recommended workflows. I'll never open up Tiber or Premo again. I'll never watch the fun animated short previews again, or watch movie cuts as they progress. The meetings are gone, the check-ins, the touch-bases, the fun merch and art books, the fitness competitions, the people who I used to see every single day, I might never see any of them ever again. 

Unless I get hired back somehow, in the future. They did say it was an option "once the studio stabilizes" and of course I would love that. But I'm not holding my breath. 

I'll wake up in the middle of the night and my brain screams at me: you lost your job again, you lost your job again, you lost your job again. You had a perfect job and now it's gone. Everything is ruined. Why did this happen? Why? 

How am I supposed to get back to California now? I'm still not done with my master's so I can't move yet, but I need a job within the next few months. I've been applying for remote positions so that way I can move without switching, and that means 10x as much competition at least. No leads yet. None. 

I can barely write right now. Every single sentence I write feels like complete garbage. I barely have been touching music and it shows. I was getting to the gym at 5 AM until I lost my job and now I barely get there at 5:30 most mornings and don't have half of the energy I once did. My art and code are on autopilot, so I am practicing those, and I've been forcing myself through 30-minute writing sessions where I need to write at least 200 words. It feels like pulling teeth but it is happening. My mind goes through so many thoughts: why didn't you work harder at writing during university? You could be publishing right now. Why didn't you double major with computer, electrical, or mechanical engineering? You'd have a more stable job right now, and you could be working on roller coasters. Sure you love coding and art, but so do a lot of real engineers...

Other times I start thinking about becoming a Leetcode beast, and maybe I will. But it's so hard to fight against the feelings of discouragement. What's the point in getting a great job if I'm just disposable anyway? Why do I even care? 

If I could go back to Adobe, that would make this all better. I loved Adobe, about as much as I did DreamWorks, though I was only at Adobe for one summer. That weekend in San Jose was one of the best weekends of my life, coupled with my February 2020 Disneyland trip. But I can't get anyone from Adobe to respond to my emails. 

Getting laid off at Sling hurt, but it was during COVID, and I mostly mourned over the connections I lost with my coworkers. With DreamWorks, it hurts even more, because I loved both the work and the people. But work relationships are fake, I guess. Once you're laid off, you're forgotten. Everyone is disposable and everyone is forgettable. It's like how I got deleted as a friend on Facebook by a bunch of people after graduating. Once you're gone, no one cares anymore. 

Out of sight, out of mind. But you never forget anyone. They just forget you. Even so, the people I worked with were good. It's the business people I hate. The COO and everyone at his level. High-functioning sociopaths who don't care about creativity or their people. All they care about is money. 

I am yearning for some form of stability here. That's all I want. I just want a stable job, with normal hours, where I won't get cut for once in my life. The emptiness of this world is palpable, a yawning chasm in my chest and stomach. I have tried for my 3 decades on this planet to fight it but in the end it always returns. Job applications are just constant rejection after rejection, except for one interview where the interviewer kept not calling me despite scheduled calls -- repeated ghosting. I feel like I'm drowning. 

And once again, this evening, I've run out of time to game. Yes, a dumb thing to complain about amidst all this, but I don't even have the executive functioning required to unwind right now. How is it that I promise myself that I will play games at 7 every night and then somehow it's 8:15 and I haven't done it? And I won't have my PC with me while in California, just my Switch. One of my New Year's resolutions is seriously going to be finally indulging in this hobby I've wanted to do ever since I was a kid. I have to figure out a smarter solution. It's too bad I can't take my gaming PC with me. I could leave it powered on to remote into it, but I'm sketched out about leaving it on at home. Paranoid about fires. I am still annoyed that I built this awesome $1200 PC and somehow haven't had time to use it for anything other than schoolwork. 

I know the time exists; I just have to manage it better. I'm incapable of relaxing -- the worse I feel, the harder I want to work. Even at theme parks I bring my study materials. 

There must be a way through this. But applying for new jobs feels pointless. I had the job I always wanted, and there was no real plan B, because that was supposed to be the end game. Until I'm ready to transition into theme parks, that is, or unless Adobe contacts me? Everything else feels like a step backwards. I guess it's hard to look for something better because I got what I always wanted. Nothing is better than what I had as a technical director at DreamWorks. When you finally got what you wanted, and then it is taken from you...what are you supposed to want that's better than that? In the end I lost it, but for 13 months, I got just what I always wanted.