I was laid off on a Tuesday. The meeting lasted eleven minutes. I know because I looked at my phone afterward in the elevator, the way you check your phone after a car accident to verify that time is still moving.

I'd worked there for nine years. I was good at it - not competent, good. There's a difference. Competent means you do the work. Good means you are partly constituted by the work. I introduced myself at parties by what I did. I thought about the problems in the shower. I was not separate from it in any way I could identify. The distinction between me and my job was theoretical.

The first two weeks were almost fine. I exercised. I read. I told people I was taking time to figure out what I really wanted. This was a performance I was giving mainly for myself, because the truth was that I had no idea what I really wanted beyond doing the thing I'd just lost.

By week six I noticed I had stopped having opinions. Not about the field - about anything. Someone would ask me what I thought about a film and I would experience a kind of static. My opinions had been organized around a professional context. Without the context, the organizing principle was gone and the opinions had nowhere to attach. I was a book without a shelf.

I'm working again now, different place, different role. It's fine. But I haven't let it become me the same way, because I now know what that costs. The separation is its own loneliness. I miss being constituted by something larger than myself. I don't trust it anymore.

How much of you is what you do? What would remain if that were taken away?