Adrift, for now
Well here I am, adrift in unemployment. For the first time since I was 10, I don’t have a mostly full-time gig.
Yes, I could say I’m retired, and many my age count the days until they can say that. But I was not ready to end my television work.
Last month, I lost my job as a producer at WQED. My sacking was part of the latest round of layoffs: 19 people in all, including beloved friends who worked beside me in local production. It was a sad day for all of us.
It’s disorienting, this imposed freedom. The first day after I was handed my papers, I woke with an empty feeling; it was the same longing I would get the morning after the high school musical had ended. I’m feeling sad now, not only because I liked the people and the work, but for a reason that’s a bit more troubling.
Who am I if not that person who made all those television documentaries? You may have seen some of them: The Great Ride, about the bike trail from D.C. to Pittsburgh; Baseball Boys, about the Monongahela Little and Pony League teams of the 1950s; Come By Here, about the history of Black churches including Mon City’s Bethel AME. I’m happy that some of my work allowed me to tell the stories of my old stomping grounds. It seems appropriate that my last completed project for WQED was a digital story about Cookie Table University, a Washington County event that celebrated the Monongahela-born Wedding Cookie Table Community.
I will still be writing this column. And my documentary work will live on, on the web and in the cloud, so I take comfort knowing I won’t disappear altogether. But without a story hunch to research, an interview to do or a script to write, who am I? It’s an existential dilemma faced by every worker. Women especially are implored not to define ourselves by what we do. We are enough just to BE.
And I get that, I guess, but this transition will be challenging. A friend told me I’ll find other satisfying TV work (although the media landscape is all scrubgrass and decline now, so I’m not optimistic); another friend suggested I find a place to volunteer. My favorite advice was from the friend who said everything will change when the first grandchild arrives.
For now I have time for longer bike rides. I’m planning to swap my cheap beginning guitar for something better as I try to improve picking my skills. I have time to read more books.
But there’s this itch. I haven’t felt it since almost 60 years ago, when my first assignment was to accompany my grade school chorus on the piano. Then there were the babysitting years of middle school, the grocery store bagger job in high school, the farm work during college, the TV news work until I was 35. Raising kids was so busy that if there was an itch, I didn’t feel it. Then came teaching college, then my work at WQED.
Through most of that, I’ve been writing this column. This summer marks 28 years of filling this space. For all those years, every Wednesday night and Thursday morning have been my writing time, a way to move the thoughts out of my head and onto this page and into your hands. I’d be even more lost without it.
I’m grateful and happy to still have this writing gig. But I will never get over losing my other job: the joys of collaboration with all those talented people, the thrill of finding and telling a really good story and then seeing it on screen – everything that came with being that Beth.
For now, that Beth is adrift.