Drop back ten and punt

When someone else makes you regroup, let 'em

The specific mid-20s crisis eludes me now, but I remember sitting on the blacktop roof of the brownstone apartment in Belltown, talking to my grandfather on my flip phone. Maybe it was just the soul-crushing poverty of being a millennial with student debt, three jobs (one an unpaid internship) and the dawning realization that for the second time in my life, I was likely going to need to pivot careers if I ever wanted to be at all financially stable.

Actually, yeah. I’m pretty sure it was that. Anyway, we were talking and that’s when he gave me this piece of advice — not for the first time, but maybe for the most important time.

“Well, buddy, sometimes…ya gotta drop back ten and punt.”

If you are not fluent in the language of old man idioms or American football, this is essentially a way of saying "while ideally you would always be making forward progress, sometimes life will beat your ass and when that happens, it’s alright to strategically retreat, regroup, and then try again.”

Sometimes you make the call to punt. Sometimes someone else makes it for you. Either way, it forces you to take a minute to collect yourself and decide what to do next. I’m writing to you from that moment.

Last month, I was fired. Not “laid off,” not “downsized.” Just regular old “we won’t be extending your employment here any further” fired. For the first time ever in my life.

And while this is my first firing, it’s absolutely not the first time that I’ve been forced to completely retool my entire career and idea of myself as a person within the capitalist structure and my identity as a human who is worth something monetarily.

I know a lot of people are this boat right now. As the Federal government and a select few bitchbaby billionaires (that’s a technical term) who have never weighed which peanut butter to buy based on the price per ounce, the expiration date, and whether or not it’s eligible for WIC or SNAP, play chicken with a functional economy and prove that they have also never seen the movie A Bugs Life, there are literally hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been forced to punt in the last few weeks.

Which, by the way, is about to get really goddamn expensive because you do know that when people get laid off, they still get paid? By? The government? Right?

And you know what? A part of me is extremely thankful. Not for getting fired — they can suck it for calling me into a 9am meeting that was allegedly my weekly one-on-one but then surprise! HR is here and suddenly you’re being logged out of everything all at once in a total cascading blackout! — but for having as much experience as I do while going through this.

I keep thinking about the relatively green employees getting let go as a result of this obscene war on workers right now. The ones who found something they were good at and liked doing, who now have to go back out into the workforce and somehow find something else, often in specialty areas wherein only the government employs people. Because the first time you get TKOed career-wise, it’s just the absolute worst.

If this is happening to you for the the first time, I want you to know: I see you. I know.

If this had happened to me 10 years ago, I would have been absolutely a wreck and certain that it was due to my laziness, my inability to do anything correctly, my own uselessness. Instead, a whoooole lot of work experience behind me, I can see acknowledge to myself that I wasn’t fired because I was lazy or unwilling to work harder. I was put into a situation where there was no other possible outcome — the onboarding was a disaster, the management was weak and ineffectual, inexperienced and selfish, and decisions were made based on favoritism rather than merit or objective KPIs (an acronym I used in a report one time that my boss highlighted and wrote “I don’t know what that means”).

As I mentioned, this isn’t the first time I had to drop back ten and punt WRT my career. I’ve had at least two (2) separate, different careers that I really, really wanted, both of which I had to walk away from because, as a single adult human with no financial support from any family or spouse, I literally could not afford to live on the wages projected.

What a terrible decision to have to make.

It’s the plot of practically every coming-of-age story that Gen X loves — do you live your dream or sell out? Of course, in the 90s, you could work as a manager at an ice cream shop and play in a band and still own a house in San Francisco or something. Now? Not so much. In the Year of our Corporate Greed 2025, “selling out” means “having the ability to buy food without selling your plasma twice a week.” And “living your dream” means “living at home and doing TikTok dances, praying you get on the PR list of a second-tier cosmetic company.”

One of the worst parts about being forcibly rerouted in your career path is the feeling that you don’t get a say in it, especially when you found something you actually liked doing. Which, of course, is no easy feat. Let’s not pretend capitalism is an especially thrilling party that we’ve all chosen to RSVP to, or that working is our preferred method of spending our time. When you find something that doesn’t actively feel like torture to do all day every day and then someone comes through and says “no, actually, you can’t do this, either,” it feels especially unfair.

That was certainly the case with the job from which I was fired. I actually really liked the work itself. It was interesting and creative and had a demonstrable impact.

Unfortunately, like so many jobs, it was the workplace, not the work itself, that sunk the ship. My firing wasn’t due to bureaucracy or the whims of a legitimate supervillain. Mine was due to a.) my own unwillingness to silently tolerate an abusive environment for me and my coworkers and b.) having ADHD. Orrrrrrrrr, more specifically, working for an employer and a management structure that provided precisely zero room for neurodiversity (see point “a”).

That’s another reason you may be forced to punt — other people’s shit behavior. I don’t need to tell anyone reading this that The Jerk Store will never, in fact, run out of stock, because there are an endless supply and somehow they’re always your manager. Regrettably, our fates are in the hands of other people more often than we’d like to admit to ourselves.

It’s why you try to get to the airport eight hours early because someone (or several someones) is always agog that you need to take off your shoes. It’s why your kid is repeating lines from YouTube videos you’d absolutely never have let them watch in your home. It’s why the relative danger of a truck the size of a blue whale to a pedestrian isn’t really a consideration at all in the United States, which is also why you’re less safe just walking around that you used to be. And it’s why new regulations to make that consideration will likely not do a whole lot, considering whose diaper-clad ass is sitting in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

And it’s why, when someone else forces you to punt — to take a moment to regroup, collect your thoughts, and to draw up the next play you want to make, not the one you would have made had you not punted — you really should take it.

Or that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. Because my natural inclination is to just like, motor on, full steam ahead, like nothing has changed and nothing is different. But something is different. I got knocked on my ass in a most surprising manner and now I have to figure out what to do next. My future doesn’t look how I thought it would look again.

Time to go back to the playbook and figure out how to make the next play count.

PS buy my book xo xo xo xo