As much as I don’t want to admit this, being unemployed has
changed my life. I wanted to be one of those disaffected women that says with a
sigh, “Well, now that I don’t have an oppressive 9 to 5 job, I can finally get
started on my novel/wedding photography business/cupcake mail-order
company/Montessori school/organic home garden.”
Wouldn’t it have been lovely if being asked to leave my awful job had
resulted in that kind of earth-shaking revelation? Wouldn’t it have been lovely
if I had realized it over a cup of chai tea, while staring calmly out the
window of my local café?
This work, the work of being unemployed, of having to craft
your own days, of trying to figure out if what you were doing was what you
wanted to do, and if it wasn’t, what it is you actually want instead, is harder
than any job I’ve had. It requires resilience and creativity and even though I
believe I possess those two things, I don’t believe I have them in the quantity
that this situation calls for. Some other things I have a little bit of, but
not enough: Patience. Self-love. Forgiveness. Confidence, even.
I realize that this doesn’t have to be a rearranging period
– that I could just focus on getting a job in the same vein as before and hope
for the best, knowing that a steady paycheck and dependable schedule will be
enough for me. But that’s just it. I
don’t know that those things are enough.
I’ve gotten used to them, I’ve become accustomed to them, and I’ve
readjusted my life based on their existence. I spent years working a cockamamie
schedule for peanuts, never knowing when I’d have a day off or whether or not
I’d be able to pay all of the bills. And in retrospect, when I hold that part
of my life up to my new 30-year old standards for happiness, it looks as though
I wasn’t actually happy. I had very few
friends and I drank more than was advisable for a girl my age and I was making far
less than I deserved for the work I was doing. But at the moment, way back
then, I didn’t know I wasn’t happy. I’m sure I didn’t greet every day with a
yawp of deranged joy, but I was good. I was making it work and surviving and
doing my best to have a little fun.
Why am I suddenly under the impression that that’s not
enough anymore? Why am I terrified to loosen my death grip on my creature
comforts? I’ve come up with this theory that anything different than a new
version of my 9 to 5 life will result in extreme, endless poverty. I will be
unhappy all the time and I’ll never eat out at a restaurant or order Indian
take-out ever, EVER AGAIN. Every time my friends ask me out for cocktails, I
will whistle into my hollow bank account, ravaged by student loan payments and
book costs, and shake my head solemnly. Sorry, ladies, I’ve committed myself to
a life of navel-gazing and ramen-eating. No whisky sours for me.
This ugly habit of mine – making my fantasies as extreme and
finite as possible – is not a new one.
When I fantasize about the future I will have with a boy I’ve been
dating for only a few weeks, I suffer the same fate. The pictures I paste
together are severe, painstakingly detailed, all of something or nothing at
all. Every job I imagine accepting is the greatest job in the history of jobs. Each
dress I buy on credit will result in an immediate improvement in my hairstyle,
complexion, sex life, and IQ.
Perhaps my problem isn’t the unemployment, or the
confidence/patience/etc. that I perceive to be lacking. It’s moderation. I need
to moderate my imagination, allow myself to dream that perhaps, life will
simply shake out as life will. That perhaps, some things will work out
swimmingly, and other will simply work out, and others will fall flat on the floor
with an audible thud. That perhaps, even with all of this messy gray area to
deal with, I will make the best of this cobbled-together,
sometimes-wonderful-sometimes-ordinary situation, because I actually am
resilient, and creative, and all of those other things. And, not least of all,
because I always do.
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