First-hand accounts of being unemployed
1. Harrison Ford Embed from Getty Images Harrison Ford is no stranger to hard work. Having moved to Los Angeles in 1964 to pursue an acting career, Ford was disappointed early on by the slew of non-speaking, B-list roles he was given in Hollywood. By his late 20s, Ford was so underemployed as an actor that he decided to take up carpentry instead to support his then-wife and two children. It wasn’t until two years later that a young George…
I prefer to look at it as deliberately not bothering to participate in capitalism rather than saying, “I’m unemployed”. It makes me feel like I’ve got a measure of agency in the fact that I’ve not had a “real” job in about five years. I had lost my last “real” job like so many others, ultimately because of an awful sleep disorder that at times is a mild inconvenience and at others a living hell with a combination of the…
It’s no secret that there’s a stigma surrounding mental health. We talk about mental health, advocate for it, and ask for more resources, but it seems that we are fighting a long, hard battle. Depression, anxiety, PTSD – can make us feel hopeless in fighting for anything at all, as feelings of shame and guilt overcome us. We often feel shunned and we don’t believe we are worthy of help because someone else always has it way worse. I’m here…
After I graduated from college, I stumbled, tripped, and smacked my face on a painful $50,000 debt bill. I went from being a young adult to a full-fledged debt payer in a matter of months. Living paycheck-to-paycheck in the hospitality industry is a whirlwind you feel like you’ll never get ahead of, especially when you have two degrees. I worked full-time at one restaurant and picked up another job to pay off my monthly loan payments. I had enough and…
I was vying for a position as an Executive Assistant when I noticed someone had posted a Mitch Albom quote about miracles in my Facebook feed. “Miracles happen quietly every day – in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a roadside stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score…” I spent my whole life trying to find miracles and it often backfired. I asked my boyfriend at the time, why I never seemed…
I lost my job with IBM in September 2013. It was not personal. IBM needed to “realign their resources (people) to be more effective.” That’s corporate-speak for pushing people out the door because the company doesn’t want them or can’t afford them any more. How did I feel when I heard that I was losing my job? Shocked. I didn’t see that one coming. Several years of layoffs had taught me that IBM might layoff anyone, regardless of their abilities,…