So this is the first blog post I’m trying by dictating it into my cellphone as I drive along. It occurred to me that one of the things keeping me from posting more regularly on Unemploymentville is feeling like a fraud. I’m in such a different place than who I’m talking to, the audience I’m writing for.

The audience I’m writing for are people who don’t have a job and want to have a job and have been looking for a job. That impacts almost everything in your life because..
1) It impacts how much money you have to spend, which of course impacts everything.
2) It impacts how you feel about yourself, this affects your relationships with others, so again…. pretty much everything.

But these challenges and issues are not actually where I’m at right now.

So I keep thinking that if I write about what’s on my mind day-to-day, it’s not of interest to my audience. Right now I am driving along trying to figure out how to balance my job and my outside interests including this blog and forum and Facebook group and maybe still have time to exercise once in a while.

But I just realized that’s okay though – cause I don’t have to make this a personal blog about me. I can use this website to write about others and others’ problems. I can understand those problems, because I have had a glimpse of what they are dealing with.

Obviously, no two people’s paths through being unemployed are exactly the same.

There’s many ways that when I was out of work and looking, I had fewer challenges than some people do. I don’t want to say I had it easy, but I had it easier. I was never at risk for being evicted, I was never at risk for foreclosure. We had my husband’s income.

On the other hand, if your spouse has a really good position that pays well and has lots of people interested in having them do work or is getting invited to meetings at work from morning until night, it can feel an awful lot like everybody wants their time, and no one wants yours. A couple of times I voiced that feeling to my husband and he said, “Now, Anne, it isn’t that people don’t want to hire you. It’s that the people who want to hire you may not currently be able to, and there’s a difference”. There’s a difference logically, BUT that isn’t how it felt to me, but, I’m digressing.

The blog, the concept of Unemploymentville is that there are many, many, many people out there struggling with being out of work and in a place they would rather not be, and just because I’m not currently struggling with this doesn’t make me incapable of understanding. I can provide a voice, enable a dialog for other people who are struggling with being out of work and paying the bills, and the emotional cloud that hangs over you in that situation.

I don’t need to feel like a fraud, writing for Unemploymentville when I have a job.

Am I capable of understanding and being the voice of people who are unemployed even though I’m not? Yes. I am.

So, there, Helga. Take that. Bye.