Latent effects of being unemployed

I haven't addressed the whole "being on the dole" thing yet.  It's just recently that I have  actually addressed it in my own mind and it's been over a year since I was unceremoniously dumped from my last place of work.  Being unemployed puts you in a category with millions of other people and thus you know you are not alone.  At first you are happy to have some free time to read, to catch up on movies in your Netflix queue, to clean out closets and take the dog for long walks. You dutifully fill out the unemployment compensation forms and naturally there is a problem with those forms (there always is) and you spend a few hours on the phone trying to get the problems resolved.  You do and ... look!  A check comes in the mail!  You get money from the government!  You are amazed that the system works.  You are also amazed at the paltry sum of the check and realize that it barely pays the rent and you contemplate cancelling your health insurance.  You get busy finding another job, answering job ads, honing your resume, perfecting your cover letter. You email 20 - 25 resumes and cover letters each week.  You receive no responses.

A couple of months go by and you are granted an interview for a job that you know you would be perfect for. The interview goes very well, you are confident they will call you back.  They do not.  Now you begin to worry.  You know you have great skills and great work experience but so do thousands of other unemployed people and most of them are younger than you are and that pisses you off.  In fact, almost everything pisses you off these days.  You have way too much free time, dwindling savings and no purpose other than walking the dog. 

You slip into a sort of general ennui and you want to stay in bed and sleep all day.  You aren't a fool, you know this is depression creeping over you like a wandering kudzu vine but you don't care.  You can't sleep at night but napping during the day becomes a ritual, curling up on the couch in the mid-afternoon.  You feel like you have Multiple Personality Disorder:  Person A worries, Person B enjoys napping, Person C feels fine about getting that unemployment check because, darn it all, she paid into that system for more than 40 years and is entitled to some remuneration, Person D knows that if she were more energetic and "out there" she would have found a new job by now.  Depression, anxiety, laziness, sloth?  What is it?  You decide you don't care and you watch another rerun of "Criminal Minds."

You begin to acknowledge the futility of sending out resumes, over and over, but you do it anyway.   The job ads are so depressing.  At the beginning of your time as a job-loser you found the ads a challenge, something to conquer.  Now they just make you sad.  Because there are so many people unemployed, those doing the hiring can have the pick of the litter.  You are competing against a younger, more talented pool of candidates who might be willing to be the Office Jesus (aka Savior) for $12.00 an hour.  You are not willing to take that job because it would net less than what the State of California puts in your mailbox every two weeks.

Now it is more than a year since you were laid off and your unemployment benefits have just run out.  You no longer bother to send out resumes because no one wants to hire you anyway.  You spend way too much time reading trashy novels.  You think of applying to Wal-Mart or a gas station convenience store.

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of this subject.  What about the dawning realization that you must move because without the unemployment check you can't afford rent?  And how does it feel to know that you have no place of your own to move to?  More to follow.  Time to walk the dog.  Again.