Unemployment, Starting Over and Fuck all 24

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 Boy; has it been an eventful start to 24, I mean truly eventful. Last year; I had a huge health scare and the thing about falling sick so bad and fast is that it puts things into perspective with such quickness it would make your head spin. 

Once I returned from my prolonged sick leave, I was ready to conquer the world, starting with putting an effort into enjoying my time in Dublin and not living a proverbial double life, Mouna in Dublin and Mouna in Hargeisa. I was going to make more friends, chase an overdue promotion at work, invest into a better wardrobe (I have an amazing wardrobe, am just a shopaholic), join a book club or two and finally see about that free gym in my building. 

But alas! Kismet swings one way while I dance the other way. On the 10th of February, at 5 fucking AM, I received an email letting me know so clinically that I have been laid off, a better term for YOU ARE FIRED HAHAHAHH. I went right back to sleep after praying fajr because whatever that was, it was a problem for well fed, medicated Mouna.  There is no other way to say it, after 3 long years of me just about to  develop bald spots from stress, they let me go. Just like that. 


Not to be dramatic but how does one start over after pouring so much into a thankless American corporation? I looked around and in the span of 1 week, I booked my tickets and started packing up 21,22, 23 into suitcases. Help arrived in the form of friends rallying, a little fidgety, scared that I might spontaneously combust from the revelation that I was unemployed for the first time in almost a decade. No I am not joking. 
                                                    

I had an interaction at an airport once where I was getting money exchanged at a counter and the nice muslim gentleman after scanning my passport went "Where are your parents?" and I was like, "I am travelling on my own". His reaction was, but you are so young! The thought that sprung to my head was, I don't feel young. I haven't felt that way in a long long time. 

But now, this opportunity had arrived, I was free. I was freed. How sweet is the taste that for the first time in a decade I was not shackled by the responsibility of either a degree of some kind or a contractual capacity.  I could just go, leave for anywhere, anytime and I chose to go home. 

Don't be baffled, Hargeisa just happened to be one of those places I had to break up with to realise just how much it meant to me. I love the dusty roads, the unencumbered people, the taste of the food. The whole city, nay the country is so vibrant with possibilities it teems with it. 

Aaaaaaand, I want to spend Ramadan and Eid with my family (especially my nephew). Point I am trying to make is, perhaps to you or to myself, is that starting over is okay. Also, ending one chapter without knowing what the second one is going to look like is also okay. I think I'd rather just float for a while, while I have the privilege to figure out myself and what that's going to look like.

Call me mama phoenix, the way I'll rise from these ashes.   



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