Leaving your workplace after almost six years is an odd experience. It’s like being thrown out of your family, nothing personal. “Nothing personal” is the sentiment echoed over and over again in the days that lead to the final farewell. Coworkers assure you that it happens to everyone. That in the corporate world being fired is almost a rite of passge. Nothing personal. On your last day, HR takes your badge, and you hand over your keys. You are officially no longer part of the group. You are an outsider. Nothing personal.

So you go home and the next morning, you wake up sort of elated, by the freedom to sleep in, no longer having to answer to a monster of a boss, to the possibilities that lie ahead. Until your hit with the sense of dread. That keeps you in bed till the afternoon, as your mind meanders through the mindfield of all the things that could go wrong in the next few months.

And you make a plan. A mental rescue plan. To flee to Dubai to heal your wounded pride in the heat of the sun, surrounded by the friends and air that once made you fearless. And to mumbai,to confront the deamons and dread of not living up to other people’s expectations.

And you hope that as you fly out of Toronto on your fifteen hour journey in a plastic tube, that you finally leave behind all those little things that bother you, like little flies in your mind: the man who claims he loves you, who never shows up, who, despite your best efforts, you cannot forget, the little incidents over the year that made little dents in your spirit, and the unconfidant, unhappy person you saw yourself becoming, all because your going to be 29 with no job, no man and generally no mark of ‘making it’ in sight.

Nothing personal ofcourse.