I find it seemingly impossible to comprehend whatever has gone on in the past week. Last week this time, I was on cloud nine thinking about the victorious moment when I walk into my boss's office and sack myself. This time this week, I just don't know what to feel. 

It turns out, that if I hadn't tendered my resignation earlier, I would have been retrenched. Yes, at age 29. It was a close shave that I had given him my resignation letter just thirty minutes before the retrenchment news was announced. I was spared the humiliation but wasn't spared the shock. The world took a drastic turn causing chaos sending people running all about. I witnessed all my colleagues who had once thought that they could launch a career chase at my present employer (an MNC) broke down. The news was hard to swallow, so hard that I have to wake up every day to remind myself this. 

We all know that print publishing is a sunset industry and it is only a matter of time that print gets completely wiped out. Searching for experience, I found myself caught in my first ever retrenchment exercise in real time. There was no prior encounter to help myself deal with such ordeal and I recalled vividly what my lecturer had said before about the volatility of business. That is, if you happen to be the bigger boy in a specific industry, your business will be largely affected in accordance with the volatility of the industry. If the industry is not making money, your business will lose a lot of money. Taking in the fixed costs that are already in place which you cannot do away with, that's where all your money goes to. So, as I've mentioned before that I'm presently working at an MNC, it's of little wonder why they had taken on such a huge pivotal shift in their business model and why it's no wonder at all that they decided to make our positions redundant -- we are the fixed costs that have been eating into the revenue. From a business's vantage point and on hindsight, what could have happened way earlier was that the business realized the need to change when the first iPad/Kindle was launched and acquired digital media companies. Not only will this move provide the company with the upper hand to govern how electronic books are being produced but too, it could have provided its employees (assets) with new skills that could have been utilized in the digital direction that the company will be undertaking. Over the last decade, print sales have significantly plummeted due to the influx of consumers' needs for digital media. Everything has to happen in a snap of a finger. No one goes to the library any more. No one has the time and Google is the king of all kings. Traditional marketing is being challenged by digital marketing and brand management being challenged by real-time consumer engagement. 

I have nothing to lose amongst everyone around me at this moment because I happen to be the lucky one to have found another job before this exercise was carried out (God, thank you once again). So I'm now counting down to the day where I leave the big and spacious office that is nevertheless hauntingly quiet. So quiet that it reminds me of a morgue that's an absolute vacuum of life. I am sure I won't miss the place but I will miss my colleagues without a doubt. They happen to be one of the purest souls I've met, sans hypocrisy and reeking of innocence from head to toe. When this happen to people who have a heart of gold, it saddens me a lot. It does. Screw the cruelty of the real world. Screw you for dampening the charging spirits of these people. Now they are all scarred.

Why do bad things happen to good people? And guys, if yours truly can give yall a piece of advice, go equipped yourself with digital knowledge please. And forget all you learnt in school about traditional marketing, branding, advertising, human resource management, business development and so on. Read all you can on the new age media and hipster way to run a business. If you're working with old traditional fucks, run before they bring you down along with them as they sink.

There is a fucking reason why all the big companies are all selling digital right?

Sleep Induction. Relaxation. Alcohol. Smoke.

As I looked upon the empty ashtray, I recalled the promise I made to myself to never smoke. Knowing this, I lit up another stick with guilt pricking on my conscience. I needed to think and to sort out a lot on my mind and cigarettes, alcohol and sleep induction pills happen to my only aid to help achieve this.

I don't know what to feel/do anymore. Thus, I had to resort to this means. And it's not I'm an alcoholic, it's not I'm a druggie. I just have to do this.

I can turn a blind eye on what's happening around me that's landed us to this situation we are in now. With each passing day, I feel I'm losing myself. I'm slipping away bit by bit. When you asked if I'm alright, if I said no, will it make things better. No it won't. Nothing is the same anymore. Everything has spoken, words have been exchanged. Ideas conveyed, and emotions expressed. Rage, sadness, happiness all fell into a salad bowl. Top it off with thousand island dressing, you get a mash up of everything. And you get a dish that doesn't make any sense.

Engulfed in emotions that are crashing on myself like merciless raging waves, I had no one to turn to to address my pain. I have no one. I don't wish to listen to negative input, deep inside me I long for an angel to sprinkle fairy dust of hope and faith. But there is none. I have only myself. Myself.

The way I have been all along.

How do I get through this? I have no idea how to anymore. Facts remain as facts. We can't alter the truth. We can't undo the hurt. We can't go back to where we were in the past.

I yearn to be lost in the dark. I want to get lost in the woods where I can be on my own. Then maybe, maybe my superman will come rescue me. And give me a miraculous dash of hope. Maybe.

For now, all I know is that I want to run away. I want to hide and be alone. To grieve over what had been, what hadn't been and what should have been.

Nothing works the way I want them to. And the saddest thing anyone has to go through, is a world without hope.

Not Love Perhaps

This is not Love, perhaps,
Love that lays down its life,
that many waters cannot quench,
nor the floods drown,
But something written in lighter ink,
said in a lower tone, something, perhaps, especially our own.

A need, at times, to be together and talk,
And then the finding we can walk
More firmly through dark narrow places,
And meet more easily nightmare faces;
A need to reach out, sometimes, hand to hand,
And then find Earth less like an alien land;
A need for alliance to defeat
The whisperers at the corner of the street.

A need for inns on roads, islands in seas,
Halts for discoveries to be shared,
Maps checked, notes compared;
A need, at times, of each for each,
Direct as the need of throat and tongue for speech. 

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond