Member-only story
The Pink Slip Society, Ltd.
What happens when your family gives you the slip
Yesterday I read a simply lovely, albeit sad, story by one of my favorite Medium peeps Ann Litts. She shared her family history, which included a piece about how she had been given the pink slip, as it were, by a part of her family that deemed her far too weird, too unworthy, too strange to be acceptable.
This hit home so deeply, but at the same time, tickled my funny bone (if only because the same shit had been thrown my way, we are in a unique club here) that I had to pen this in response.
Every time I’m at the gym with my ear buds in, I listen to a George Carlin riff that nearly makes me drop my dumbbells on my feet. He’s talk about word choices and the origins of phrases. In this case, pink slips. He says that he got fired a lot. “You can tell,” he says. But in his case, someone would walk over to his desk and say,
GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!!
In families, if you get the familial pink slip, this is precisely how it feels.
While in Carlin’s case, it’s funny as shit, in families, it isn’t.
When I told my father he was an alcoholic to his face, the same thing happened to me.