When your career disappears, so does your reflection.
Churchill had his black dog. This one was grey.
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A past reflection on being a societal ghost, being unemployed.
Unemployed, the word itself sleeps in the corner of my brain like a mangy dog; Churchhill spoke of the black dog of depression, and to borrow from him, unemployment is the grey dog of anxiety. It sleeps quietly and minds its business but is ready to wake, howl, and nip. Even after 20 years of being back in the workforce and pleased with how my career has evolved (when your jobs aren’t well connected, you call it a “portfolio career”), anxiety remains; even with the dog down, he hasn’t left the room.
I never thought it was possible to be unemployed for a year.
Of course, I had heard the stories, but those people were lazy, drifting on the periphery of society. But now I am one of "those people." It is a year after hearing the speech that brought the almost ten-year “good job” to a grinding halt: "Give me your key."
I know that was the moment I became a ghost.
Now I float through job postings, calling up companies, drifting meekly into Chamber of Commerce business breakfasts, presenting business cards with scarcely more than my name on it and seeing a suit lose interest quickly, their eyes unfocused, looking through me, wanting a more worthy business contact; meeting people for the sheer point of becoming more then three sheets of 8½ by 11 paper or a digital file, watching them lean back in their office chair, hearing that they hope to start hiring in three to six months, feigning gratitude, an apparition of enthusiasm; and then walking onto the street at 3 p.m. all the while wondering if I looked unemployed or just like someone who was taking a day off and running errands.
The next day.
Unemployment and shame shadow me as I step off the bus at 8 a.m. My casual dress belies my unemployment, walking off to a career-search tactics workshop, jealously looking at all the people going to their jobs in the office buildings. How did all these people find jobs, and why was I now on the outside? Official figures cite a low unemployment rate, but I wonder about the validity of these numbers; people are ashamed of being unemployed; they say they are consultants, self-employed, or working part-time. And if the economy is not creating good jobs and new job hunters are moving in each week, the unemployment numbers seem irrelevant; they seem more like phantasms created by some public relations hack to help someone in government get re-elected.
I was selling my stuff—the MP3 player, stereo, TV, and RSPs—and now my house is on the market. I didn't need them; the RSP numbers were just numbers on some statements. However, my perspective may differ if I end up being 65 and wearing a Walmart vest.
The real trick is to cope daily with the omnipresent silence, the unreturned calls from recruiters and companies, the hundreds of résumés e-mailed accompanied by a cheery and emphatic letter extolling my virtues that seemed to float into some dark netherworld, which silently swallows them. And then one must deal with the flotsam of a career break on the rocks -- the flat dial tone that says no messages. This e-mail box has more e-mails from some pseudo-bureaucrat in Africa who needs my bank account number to share his oil windfall with me than e-mail responses from employers.
The silence is surreal—the silence of a canned response, a flattering rejection email saying how impressed they were with my skills. However, the "Dear Candidate" introduction made me question their sincerity, and I never knew why I was not accepted. Time, too, seems to matter much more to the unemployed than to the employed. Looking at hiring in October? That’s three months; "We will see” is not reassuring.
Should I throw off the whole albatross of unemployment, of "career ambition," to do like Kevin Spacey in the movie American Beauty, to gloriously and without shame throw myself into a fast-food career, taking the advice of all the acquaintances who were hidden career experts? They show traces of schadenfreude occasionally - in a tone, a smirk, or a raised eyebrow.
But the mortgage and the credit card that the Shopper's Drug Mart girl declined last week keep snapping me back to reality. Still, it creates no small measure of inner conflict: one side no longer wants to rank me on some career grid, wanting to sum up my worth based on an MBA or some foolish title. In contrast, the other side desperately clamours for the financial security of a good job and the psychological safety of being able to respond to all the "What do you do?" questions.
It is status, status, always status. The latter seems always to win; the luxury of stepping away from the ignominy of unemployment is not allowed. Is security an illusion based on status? Why, when the insulation that career brings is ripped out, and when the comfort of the workday routine of coming and going is no more, does it leave the feeling that one is merely haunting the edges of society, waiting to have a career restored, to be made a fleshy whole again?
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