So you haven’t seen or heard much from me recently.

Why is that?

The truth is I have a job now and I was working a lot of extra hours.

 

Is that rude?

When people who are working too many hours complain about it to someone who is unemployed?

What do you think?

It kind of feels like it’s rude to me, but yet…

NOT talking about what is going on in your life because your friend has a different employment status than you do is isolating, for everyone.

And ever the dreamer, I have of course, started a bunch of other projects and worked on those other than Unemploymentville, including the one I was initially going to jump back into about 3 weeks ago – No-Work Spanish.

But two things stopped me and made me move Unemploymentville back to the top of my project list
1) a friend lost her job and as she talked to me, I remembered how it felt and I realized I didn’t have to be unemployed to still ‘get it’. My time being unemployed was so overwhelming, it is permanently imprinted on my brain. So, I’m not going to apologize for having a job while I run the website Unemploymentville.

We can’t stop talking to each other just because one of us has a job and the other doesn’t.

Besides, I think I had to get a little distance from Unemploymentville before I could even write about it. When I was inside, in the darkness, I struggled to stay positive about anything. You know, like you wouldn’t expect a woman in labor to coach another woman in labor, right? For me be encouraging and hopefully helpful to the Unemploymentville community, I had to on some level get the heck out of there first, which happened when I got a job.

Oh… and the second reason I chose to focus on this website, dubbed ‘Unemploymentville’ over No-Work Spanish.

It occurred to me that…

No one ever killed themselves because they couldn’t learn Spanish.

But people have killed themselves because they couldn’t find a job and couldn’t bear to go on without one. And that is the person (the one who is at the end of their rope) who I have to remember when I’m considering whether to start another episode on Netflix of Gray’s Anatomy. I’d like to build this to be an online community for people who are struggling or have struggled with a stretch of unemployment.

It’s time someone put Unemploymentville on the map.
That someone is me. I’m back.