Yes. You are reading it right. This is an attempt to write something a bit more interesting than the latest post. Been too long since I really wrote anything good on here. Could be due to the fact I spend five days a week, 8 hours a day at an office doing mostly nothing besides writing. Somehow I have no energy left to think or write anything when I get back home in the evenings.
I like the place I’m at. It feels like a real office, a place of work.
There are 15 people there now. Men and women. Ages ranging from early thirties to early sixties. All working on projects and having time to socialize. There are many experienced, educated and skilled people there and the one more thing we all have in common is that we are unemployed and have been for more than two years.
Being unemployed for long periods of time wears a person down. It’s a fact. No one escapes it.
At the start, the first month or two, you think you’ll soon find another job and you work hard at searching for employment. Then as time passes and nothing happens you adjust more and more to being outside of the working life. The everyday life. You start to have trouble sleeping, you stay up too late, you worry, you feel depressed and lonely and shut out. You blame yourself even though you may have been a productive employee for twenty years before having had to leave your job due to cutbacks or because the place of work is closed down permanently. Your “crime” is only to be out of work. Society treats you like a criminal or at least like there’s something wrong with you. They think that there has got to be something wrong with you since a “normal” person is not unemployed. A “normal” person gets up in the morning and goes to work. But you don’t. You get up to read job ads, write applications, call employers or go from business to business asking for work. You battle with authorities to get the small amounts of money you are allowed to survive by. Meanwhile time passes and your life along with it.
That’s what life is like where I am at. Since late 2006 I have had 6 months of employment. My life is in ruins. My economy is in ruins. Yet I’m alive and still looking for work. Still apply for hundreds of jobs each year. Still ask around, still keep trying. While I’m watching life pass me by.
Ok. I’m, not writing this to make anyone feel sorry for me. Doesn’t matter anyway. Life still looks the same no matter how I or anybody else feel about it. But I do write to tell you who are not in this unfortunate situation to be thankful you’re not in my shoes. I once had what you have for a number of years and I was happy with the life I had. Never even imagined it could change. So, the fall to the bottom is easier than I thought but the climb back up is a lot more difficult than I could ever imagine before having to try.
So, on this Saturday, if you have a weekend off from work – enjoy it. Make the best of it. You never know how long it lasts.
I’ll be enjoying my Saturday too. But I will not be able to shake the feeling of uneasiness that comes with always thinking I’m guilty of something.