When I’d gotten laid off, the managers said it had nothing to do with my performance. They had purchased a piece of software that could do my job at a thousand times the speed. There was no way I could compete, and they were very sorry. They offered me a month of severance for every year I had been at the company. Seven months of pay.

I had joined when I was still considered a young woman, twenty-seven, at the cusp of my late twenties. Now I was very much in my thirties, jobless, with nothing tying me to the place where I lived besides the one-bedroom apartment I rented that still had ten months on the lease. I wasn’t hurting for money yet, but I was bored and growing increasingly anxious. I suspected I should be doing more with my time than eating weed gummies and lying in bed binge-watching reality dating shows with heinous and hilarious names like Simp Island and From Stalker to Lover. The shows made me certain I would die alone. It wasn’t necessarily the most frightening thought, since I liked being alone, but it was the first time in my life that I had the time to meditate on my mortality, on how everything I had spent the last seven years of my life doing—focusing on my career, developing my independence, saving my money for some future better life—had been, ultimately, meaningless, and it stirred inside me feelings I had difficulty understanding, let alone managing.

Two months into unemployed life, a former coworker took pity on me. He texted to ask if I would be open to a monthlong house- and pet-sitting job for friends of his family, who were having a hard time finding somebody they could trust (and, I assumed, had the free time in their schedule). The only requirement: a video interview with the owners of the house. The work acquaintance suspected it was more a formality—he had already told them I was a perfect fit. I had been perceived as competent at my previous job. I listened, I didn’t fuss, I fixed other people’s mistakes.