Without Work, Who Was I? ; When Dominique Browning Was Made Redundant From Her High-Flying Job After 12 Fulfilling Years, Her World Came Crashing Down. But, She Says, It Was Only When She Hit Rock Bottom That Life Began to Take a Turn for the Better

Summary

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For 12 years, I had a job I loved as the editor of the US edition of House & Garden, a magazine that celebrated the good life. The folding of the magazine was ruthless. Without warning, our world collapsed. I came to work on a Monday in 2007 and was told to have everything packed up by Friday. Security guards were immediately posted by the doors.

In the four days we were given to sort out our belongings, I was overwhelmed by an urge to hoard, and began stuffing every House & Garden pencil and notepad I could get my hands on into a box, so that I'd never run out of office supplies. Everything with our logo on it was destined for the dustbin anyway. I salvaged enough to run a small corporation from my kitchen.

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Without Work, Who Was I? ; When Dominique Browning Was Made Redundant From Her High-Flying Job After 12 Fulfilling Years, Her World Came Crashing Down. But, She Says, It Was Only When She Hit Rock Bottom That Life Began to Take a Turn for the Better

Even so, a few weeks later I realised I had some gaping holes in the inventory: I had no ink for my printer. The pages of my CV looked faded, ghostly. You would think I was fading, too, but I wasn't. I was getting plump. All I could think about was food. This was the beginning of being hungry all the time. My addled brain interpreted the white noise of unemployment to mean that I was going into hibernation.

For years, I had a profound dread of unemployment that went way beyond worrying about how to pay the bills. Work had become the scaffolding of my life. It was what I counted on. It held up the...

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