What’s wrong with Anne’s face in this drawing?

I was unemployed, that’s what.

My eyes show that I’ve been left behind by the rest of the world and I’m pretty damn broken up about it. My mouth isn’t even able to find the center of my face. Because….  nothing in my life was lining up like it was supposed to. Not even the features on my face.

I’ve got such a puny neck that it’s no wonder it was difficult to hold my head up properly. I’m kind of trying to smile but it just isn’t happening.  So that is unemployed Anne.

Compare it to what ‘Normal Anne’ looks like:

Now, I know, you’re going to say, “these are just drawings!”

Well, here let’s compare an untouched photo of me at a time when I had a job with the second drawing:

I nailed it, didn’t I?  Okay, maybe I glossed over a few wrinkles here and there, but if you saw the drawing you’d be able to spot me in a crowd, for sure.

The photo is about 4 years old now, back before I entered Unemploymentville.  So now maybe you believe me, when I tell you the first sad drawing is me unemployed.

I have a job now. I’ve been there for almost 2 years and this has been a problem for me in developing Unemploymentville. I created a website about unemployment with a forum and a blog and then I kind of abandoned it because I felt like a fraud. How can I talk about what it feels like, looks like in Unemploymentville if I have a job? And no one was going to want to hear that I was too busy to post because I was working too many hours, right?

But I’ve had a couple friends recently unemployed. One went back to school, a perfectly valid escape from being considered unemployed. If you are a student, you are a student, regardless of your age. But the other is still looking for a job and I realized that in abandoning Unemploymentville, I’ve abandoned her. The idea of Unemploymentville was to create a community, for people temporarily displaced from the workforce.

So I am re-committed to sprucing up Unemploymentville.com and I also created the Facebook Community, Unemploymentville.  Naturally I used my photo, er drawing, from when I didn’t have a job as my profile picture.

P.S. If you are interested in drawing like a pro, I learned most everything I know from How to Draw Cartoons by Brian Platt

P.P.S. I also started drawing based on an idea in The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success — that the key to learning how to do anything is to just do it, do it some more, do it some more… and then spot the winners. No one gets to see the also-ran drawings.

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