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The Unemployment Blues

posted 10th November 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Job/Career/Work, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

Depression LineI have experienced three periods of unemployment in my adult life. The first was when I first finished undergrad, the second, was when I returned from living in France, and I’m currently into my fourth month of my third period of unemployment.

Having gone through unemployment so many times, one would think I’d be good at it.

And, in some ways I am.

But the truth is no matter how we try to dress it up in terms like “funemployment” being conventionally unemployed… sucks.

Oh sure, it’s great for awhile.

You can sleep all day, party all night and live in your PJ’s. And for a week or so, as you peel off the layer of exhaustion that often comes with trying to juggle full-time work with a full-time life, being unemployed rocks…until it doesn’t.

This is something that most of my friends, who’ve never been unemployed, Do. Not. Get.

They don’t get, for example, how because most of us have spent our lives either in school or at work for someone else we never learned how to structure our own time. Yet, when you’re unemployed all you have is time: a yawning chasm of a day that must somehow be filled. Learning how to fill your unemployed time, without going crazy is a skill that must be learned or else you’ll find yourself awake at midnight wondering where your day went and how you managed to accomplish nothing more than showering, watching bad TV and facebook stalking your exes.

Or so I’ve heard.

I’ve found it helpful to make two lists: a monthly list what I want to accomplish that month (thinking short-term when unemployed is your friend), and a daily list I make every night which lists what I’m going to do the next day to help me accomplish my larger goals for the month, as well as reminding me to do the mundane survival things like pay my student loans. I find it helpful to structure my day into blocks: things I will accomplish between 9:00am and 11:00am, 11:00am and 1:00pm. I even go so far as to put mundane things like eat breakfast on the list, because while most people manage to gain wait while laying around doing nothing I’ve managed to drop almost ten pounds because I simply forget to eat (and I’m realizing as I type this that I’ve been awake for three hours and haven’t eaten anything… the list system, is admittedly not perfect).

Something else the ‘always employed’ don’t recognize is how socially isolating being unemployed is. When you have a job you talk to people – even if it’s the drone the next cubicle over. There’s chitchat around the coffee pot, people you have lunch with, happy hour after work. When you’re unemployed the loose social interaction that happens at the office is nonexistent, unless you count my relationship with Benson & Stabler from Law and Order: SVU.

And I am broke. Really broke. So spending money I don’t have on things such as happy hour just doesn’t make economic sense reinforcing cycle of loneliness.

My solution, however, has been a two tiered prong of stacking my days and volunteering.

Volunteering helps because it puts you into contact with people who can make a career connection – it’s a valid expense. I try and stack my networking/job interviewing events with social ones: if I’m already blowing $4.50 to get into the city for an interview, I can dawdle (for free!) in a bookstore while waiting to meet friends for drinks. I suck back water while they’re imbibing on something stronger (my friends are not scrooges, they are too happy to buy me a round of drinks but a combination of pride and common sense- there is nothing sexy about an unemployed alcoholic- means I try not to take them up on their offers too often).

Volunteering also helps because apart from getting some awesome social interaction, sometimes you get a free meal, a free drink or both out of it.

But I’m not going to lie, the thing that makes unemployment easiest to deal with is the hope, that if you keep plugging away, eventually… it’s going to end.

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