figuring out who you are through unemployment

Unemployment is a lonely, confusing, anxiety inducing, but freeing experience. The longer I stay unemployed, the more grateful I am for the time and space to get lost in my creative endeavors and reevaluate my relations to capitalism. Money is a consistent anxiety, but it is rare to have this much free time to figure out what an authentic life looks like for me. 

The “overachieving eldest daughter to burned out, mentally ill daughter who just wants to travel the world, do arts and crafts 24/7, and never hold a real job” pipeline is REAL. Alive and well!  

I’m hoping this blog post will reach the other eldest daughters on a similar journey. It feels all too real and relatable, until I talk to those around me and struggle to find commonalities with the people in proximity to me. 

This whole post is probably just a cry for help. A blog post screaming into the void in hopes of finding a community that feels as lost and confused, but also content?? I’m surprisingly not also in a depressive episode right now… I guess the universe tossed me a bone! 

I am 27 years old, unemployed obviously, living at home, and am feeling lost and conflicted on how I want my life to go. 

It’s not a super unique position to be in, especially right now. There are so many other people unemployed these days, being in your 20’s is confusing for everyone, and more people are moving home to save money from the sky rocketing rent prices. I’m not an anomaly by any means, despite any isolation I might experience. 

Some of my favorite posts on Substack recently have been about other people’s unemployment eras. It honestly has made me feel significantly less alone and I am always eager to read about their revelations, no matter how deep or surface level they go. There is a lot to be learned from an unemployment era. 

Regardless of why someone is unemployed, there seems to be a camaraderie between us. We are all going through a shared experience, one that includes a lot of shame, unfortunately. Being without a job in a society that values career success above all else, is not easy to maneuver. The judgement can be incredibly hard to block out. 

For me, I’ve been doing a lot of work in unpacking this shame and what it means to not have my identity and self worth connected to my ability to make money. 

And of course, unemployment has given me plenty of time to think and write about the slew of realizations and mental breakdowns I’ve had thus far. 

“So what do you do?” “What have you been up to?” “What do you do for work?” 

Truly nightmare fuel. 

I have been fully unemployed for the last several months. 

My responses to these questions, ever since graduating college, have not felt fulfilling. They haven’t brought me pride. I bask in the shame that I have yet to find this extravagant career that offers me financial stability, health insurance, and more importantly, a job title that I can hide behind well enough to escape the judgemental eyes of everyone around me. 

It’s funny because when I was younger, I had so much drive and ambition and I felt like I knew exactly what I wanted to do. To be 27, and in the position that I am in, is one that I never would have imagined for myself at 16. I guess that’s how it goes though right? You know so much when you're a teenager until you blink and you’re an adult with no clue what to do. 

We can sit here and blame COVID maybe…

Let’s be real,  we will always be able to sit here and blame that period of life for throwing us all upside and never returning us to the people we were before a global pandemic hit. It would be impossible to deny the impact that has had on our society. 

In hindsight, I can be thankful for the drastic life change, but can’t help but imagine who I would be without it. I might’ve gone on to get my PhD, found a nice paying job, got married, settled down and had that white picket fence life. A life that is my true nightmare at the moment, if we're being honest. 

As someone who is now a lesbian, spent a good chunk of my 20’s traveling, and beep bopping through life with not much of a plan, that other reality is so distant and long gone for me. I can’t help but feel like those early years of my 20’s were stolen. I did follow the guidelines very strictly until 2021, when I could get vaccinated. I lost a lot of friends, went through a spiritual awakening, figured out I had a couple undiagnosed mental things, and I just came out the other side of 2020 a completely different person. 

When I saw how quickly the world could go to sh*t, and how our government didn’t care for us, it really changed the way I wanted to maneuver through the world. 

Up until that point, I had done everything “right.” I was valedictorian of my class in HS, went on to make the Dean’s List all 4 years of college, and had every intention of pursuing grad school, immediately after undergrad. I felt like the only option was to put my head down, do the work, not question anything, and I would just end up doing what everyone else was doing. I would be content, is what I thought. 

I went through a breakup during COVID, while I was quarantining back in my hometown with my family. I had already been severely depressed and begging for a break from my life. I was miserable with where I was. I was suicidal. For a while there, I felt like maybe I wished COVID upon us. It was the break that I never knew I could get. Time stopped, and I had this space to think about who I was without all the influence from everyone around me. 

I had time to think about what I really wanted for my future, who I was, what I valued, and how I wanted to move forward from there. The unfortunate bit was that time didn’t actually stop. It kept going and now I have blinked and I’m in my late 20’s, not any closer to this “career” that everyone around me seems to already have. The past several years have been a blur. 

When you get to my age, life starts to feel a bit more serious. It’s that Saturn Return sneaking up on you. Suddenly life feels more like a pressure cooker than it ever has before. When I was in my early and mid twenties, it felt like I would never get to be this age. 

27….  God forbid 30?? It felt like a lifetime away. To a certain extent, 30 still feels like a long way away, but at 27, feeling like I'm still 24, I know that I will be 30 in a blink of an eye too. 

I can’t help but feel like COVID has caused this lasting impact on everyone. Of course there is the fact that it has killed and disabled so many, but just that life has not been the same since 2020. It feels like yesterday, but I can’t fathom who I was before that point either. I don’t care to know that version of myself anymore. 

I was never someone who knew exactly where I would be in life at this age, partly because I could never really conceptualize being this old. I went through middle school and high school rigorously preparing for college. Everything I did, and overexerted myself, was so I could get into a good college and have a fantastic resume. I did go to a school with a 90+% acceptance rate, so all those hours cramming to become the valedictorian seemed a bit pointless once I got there. 

That’s a little background on me because context feels important, but back to my unemployment journey, because that is in fact the whole point of this post!

I finished up coaching basketball back in my hometown in February, and instead of finding seasonal work like I had been doing for several years, I decided to remain unemployed for a bit longer. This decision stemmed from the idea of having more time to pursue things that brought me joy, and figure out who I am outside of the confines of capitalism and the pressure to make money. 

Who am I when I am not commodifying myself and running myself ragged? Who am I when I give myself space to sit in the discomfort of unemployment? Who could I be if I wasn’t constantly anxious about making money? What does it look like to live a life authentic to me within capitalism? Is it even possible? 

I do want to mention that I am also autistic, for context. I would say questioning the way the world works is a natural instinct for me. 

On top of unpacking this internalized capitalism mindset, I’m also working through my internalized ableism, which I didn't realize I struggled with so badly, until I found myself saying to my therapist “I don't want to be the type of autistic person that is unable to work.” 

I want to be honest about that feeling because for myself, it is a true thought I have had. After spending my whole life being exceptionally dedicated to maintaining an overachieving persona, I am in a place right now where I am unable to hold a full time job, even if I wanted to. This is something that is genuinely very hard for me to come to terms with. 

I joked with her that if I said that during my Tik Tok days, I would be canceled. It’s true, what I said was ableist. Because even after knowing of my diagnosis for 6 years, I still struggle to accept that I am disabled. That my life and the way I structure my life needs to be different from the expectations I set for myself when I was younger, and different from the expectations of those around me. 

I don’t judge other autistic or disabled people that cannot work and need more assistance, but for some reason, I really struggle accepting that as my reality. Trust me, I am unpacking that in therapy and examining that inherent feeling that my worth is solely tied to working and being able to provide for myself. 

This unemployment and self discovery journey is also exacerbated by the fact that I am living with my parents back in my hometown. I will say, it's a great privilege to be intentionally unemployed in this economy, knowing that I have my parents to help me, especially financially. I don't take that for granted. 

Being in my hometown can be hard because people I’ve known my whole life are constantly asking what I’m doing. Even though conceptually I know they don't think about me 24/7, I have convinced myself that everyone is judging what I am doing. 

Being able to have this unemployment era has forced me to come more into who I am, to be more comfortable with the idea of being misperceived and misunderstood. 

Being perceived incorrectly has always been one of my biggest fears and worries in life. I like to control the narrative and perception around me. Years in therapy have taught me that, unfortunately, I will never be able to control another person's perception of me and it has, and always will be, out of my control. 

Surprisingly, over the last few months, I have actually gotten more comfortable allowing people to see me as unemployed. Maybe they judge me for a couple minutes, thinking I'm a washed up bum who squandered away all my potential. I'm just wasting away in my hometown and will probably never amount to anything anymore. 

They MIGHT be thinking that, or I occupy one minute of their thoughts after they see me, and then they go back to worrying about their own lives and focusing on literally anything else in this messed up world and don’t give my life path a second thought. 

If you judge yourself through the lens of other people, don't worry I do this all the time. I think I am getting better about it, but it is definitely something I have to come up against constantly. I can’t assume people are thinking that about me, that is assuming the worst in people. I am simply projecting my insecurities on to them and that is not fair. I can’t read their minds! 

From a very young age, we are conditioned to work. We are conditioned to find our value in society with what we can contribute to the machine. This isn’t to discredit the important jobs out there, but let’s be honest, there’s so many computer jobs that don’t even feel REAL. It feels way too soul sucking for me to go and work for some asshole CEO that doesn’t care if I live or die. 

I know there will come a point where I cannot live like this any longer. I can’t live in this reality for the rest of my life. I DO need money and I will need to find a source of income that works for my lifestyle and goals. 

I have since realized that my goals have shifted and what I value and care for in my days has also been shifting. 

I used to think I needed to buy a big house. In this housing crisis, I would be content with ever being able to buy a home of really any size honestly. Truthfully, I adore smaller homes anyways. I love the coziness. 

Unemployment has taught me to enjoy the beauty in our world. I enjoy waking up to a slow morning. I try to journal most mornings, make my coffee and breakfast, take my meds, and think about what would fill up my cup for the day. 

I have found that I really prefer a mid day workout. I used to force myself to workout in the early mornings, and by the end of the day, forget it! I am not working out at night. 

I live in an unusual place where a lot of people around me live non-traditional lives. I know a lot of people who own their own businesses and can workout any time during the day. I envy them and I am also inspired by people who have created a life around what matters the most to them. 

I look at some of my friends with nicer jobs and I have realized that I don’t even want to trade places with them right now. Money would be nice, duh. We all need money, but the work and energy they give in exchange for their salaries is truly not something I envy at the moment. 

The more I am unemployed, the more I realize life is lived outside of work. I have time to slow down, focus on what I value, and learn new things about myself that I wouldn’t have the energy to do if I was working full time. Yes, I am romanticising my unemployment. 

While I am ready for this period of financial ambiguity and stress to end, I will look back at this era with rose colored glasses. How couldn't I? I am living such a slow, ideal life (mostly), and I really can’t complain. 

I will need to find a job, I will figure out a career, find my passion…. Eventually. I have an odd degree of faith in the universe and trust that my life is unfolding as it should. I do feel behind, but when I really think about that, it means nothing to me. I am behind a societal standard that doesn’t work for me, or even appeal to me. 

Do I care what others think of me? I mean yes, but also no. 

We’re all on our own paths, and everyone is more focused on their own path anyways. 

If your path involves unemployment, you're not alone. Sending you all positive vibes in your job searches and evolution as a worker in this society. Maybe you haven't spent this much time unpacking your unemployment shame, but I do hope you got something out of this blog post and it is a starting point in your journey to unpacking what you truly desire out of your life. 

The goal is always to live a life that charges your soul and feels authentic and freeing to you, no matter what that looks like to the outside world. 

Thanks for reading, friends! I’m happy to be back writing here. 

DISCLAIMER 

Whether you were laid off, quit your job and looking for a new one, or just taking time to bask in your jobless era while living with your parents, unemployment presents an array of challenges. Every experience will look vastly different, and I don’t expect too many people to necessarily resonate with my exact experience. We all exist under capitalism though, and that does mean a certain shared reality is present. 

I’m not here to write about the financial struggles because that is a given. If you’re not working, you’re probably not making money. It’s possible you have passive streams of income, maybe a side hustle that gets you by, but you're not clocking in, receiving a salary, and making a consistent income at the moment. 

This economy is f*cked and money gives me heeps of anxiety, that could be its own separate post, but I am here to talk about the mental aspect of being unemployed in a society that values work output, more than your well being. 

My heart goes out to those that might not have a supportive family like me, I do live with my parents, so that need to pay rent is relieved, and I truly never take that for granted. This unemployment phase would feel ENTIRELY different and more stressful, if that was looming over my head.