My friend N is a close to sixty, very little formal education and many responsibilities all her life. She is smart and get many jobs done. These days she is not particularly employable in a market where white collar jobs are hard to come by. Her age does not help either. But what hurts her most is her track record of being a contractor all her life and not a salaried employee. That has now become tantamount to job-hopping which is not desirable. The irony of the situation is that a person who wishes to stay put in their current place of employment has very little if any control over that outcome.
It does not matter what they do, how good they are at it and how critical their role is to the organization. If there is to be a headcount reduction, the most astonishing decisions are made and the person joins the ranks of the job-hoppers, a creature of circumstance. Such is not the case with N but she is viewed in similar light, She recently changed jobs and the excitement for newness faded within the first couple of days - a commute three times as longer than what she had before, a dysfunctional program that she is supposed to magically manage into shape and no line of sight even six months out when the contract ends.
N has a son who is still in university, not fully ready to launch on his own. She wants to be free after struggling for decades to get out of a bad marriage. She achieved that goal a few years ago - a moment of triumph and an act of courage that continues to nourish her. But freedom is a moving target specially for those who yearn for a particular version of it. I should know because I was one of those people for the longest time.
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