Magnifico

Bohemian Rhapsody starts with one voice, quietly asking, is this the real life?

By the end there are somewhere in the region of forty-seven Freddie Mercurys (Mercur-i?), a guitar solo that is obnoxiously good and Wayne and Garth headbanging in a beat-up car.

Redundancy does something similar. Starts quietly; you, a laptop and a vague sense of ‘this’ll all be fine’. Then around maybe week three it becomes an entirely different experience with significantly more moving parts than the original premise hinted at.

There’s a phase of the job search that’s like the operatic section of Bohemian Rhapsody, nothing in the opening prepared you for it. It arrives out of the blue, bears no resemblance to how things started, yet somehow is the bit that defines the whole experience.

Things were moving, conversations building and there was a sense the process was going somewhere. Then the inbox just drops, super quiet, like the song forgot what it was doing for a moment. The rational response is to fill that silence with volume.  More applications and more output. Which feels productive right up until you realise effort and outcome aren’t subject to the by-laws of causality.

This week Geoff Curtis sat down with me to talk about exactly that. Geoff is the author of ‘Embracing Your Own Purgatory’, a book about those uncomfortable in-between spaces that career transition creates and why the instinct to sprint through them might be the thing slowing you down.

We talk about identity, about what redundancy quietly dismantles beyond the job title and about what it looks like to sit with uncertainty rather than outrun it; which is easier to say than to do. Geoff makes a compelling case for why it’s worth trying anyway.

Snippet below. If it sounds like something someone in their own quiet patch needs to hear, sharing is like scream-singing Galileo Figaro.