Unemployment - What Leaving the Rat Race Has Taught Me

          I am fast approaching a full year of unemployment.  It's not something I want to think about.  But as another month goes by with me filling out job applications on-line and trying to do as much social networking as I can, I have been looking back over the past 8 months and thinking about how I have changed in this time.  I would like to share with you some of the things I have learned about myself.  

       Lesson #1 -- I am not a depressed individual!  When I worked and was part of the rat race, I would get up and often dread having to go to work.  I loved the people I worked with.  I was not a big fan of the people I worked for.  As the company started to downsize, some of the employees who have worked there for over 10 years got some not so subtle hints that our new bosses were not so happy with us.  It's not that my work ethic had changed any.  It's not that my level of work or quality of my work had changed at all.  It was simply that I was deemed too old or an old timer and it was time to clear away those employees who were getting paid too much and had too many benefits.  My new boss would suddenly find some crazy reason as to why my work was no longer what they were looking for.  I would get questioned about decisions I made that were the right decisions in the past, but suddenly were not the right decisions any longer.  

    When you go to work every day knowing that your contribution to a company is not appreciated, welcomed or wanted, it can kind of mess with your mind.  You start to wonder if there is something wrong with you.  I went to work each day wondering if this would be my last.  I knew they had no real reason for getting rid of me, but I knew they would finally find some phantom reason to let me go.  Dealing with that day in and day out got me pretty depressed.  I started questioning my abilities, my self-worth, my reason for living.  Those Cymbalta commercials really spoke to me.  You know the one.  It starts with a woman lying on a couch.  She is holding a striped little kitten in her lap.  The announcer asks "where does depression hurt?  Everywhere."  "Who does depression hurt? Everyone."  I really felt like that woman.  I felt like I could curl up on my couch and shut off the world and not really care that I had cut off everything.  I was wondering if maybe getting on an anti-depressant might help me deal with the day to day crap I was not dealing with so well at work.  But I didn't look into it seriously.  I was having trouble following through on anything.  It took most of my mental energy just to get up and go to work everyday and deal with the high stress of the whole situation.  I had to work extra hard to insure that I didn't make any mistakes at work.  But the problem was I had no idea what my employer would decide that day what a "mistake" was.  Each day the gameplan changed and as a player, I was not given the gameplan.  I was just sandbagged. I had to defend my actions on almost a daily basis.  After months of this, I finally just grew too mentally tired to fight back much and that's when they got me.  They saw my weakness and finally decided it was time for me to go.  

   When the upper management called me into the office, I knew this was the time.  I knew they were going to let me go.  I was angered that they had no good cause to let me go.  I know the reason was bogus.  I know I had done nothing wrong and that they had been on a path to destroy me for months.  But I also felt a sense of relief.  I no longer had to overcome this feeling of doom.  I did not have to put up a front of being happy.  I no longer had to try harder and harder for people who would never be pleased with anything I did in my job.  I was finally free of that burden.  

   I thought I would get more depressed after losing my job.  I did not.  I no longer had that heavy feeling of dread on a daily basis.  I no longer had my life controlled by my work.  I had a job where I was called upon day and night and weekends if something came up.  I had to work overtime and sometimes worked through weekends and had to beg for a day off after working 9 straight days of 10 hour days.  For the first time in my professional life, I did not have to worry that the phone ringing could be work calling.  I could make plans knowing that I would not have to cancel them at the last minute because work interfered.  My time was actually my time for the first time in a long time.  I didn't have the stress any longer.  I was not weighed down by that feeling of doom I carried for so many months.  And although I had no job and had no idea what I was going to do financially, I was not too worried.  My new sense of relief actually made me feel a bit happy.  

   I am the kind of person who can get pretty down on life if things are not going well for me.  Or at least I always thought I was that kind of person.  My past pattern in my high stress profession was that I always felt a little depressed when over-stressed.  I was one of those people who was desperate for a vacation just so I could de-stress and relax.  I ran on high until I burned out and needed a break from work just to revive myself.  But once I stopped working at full speed, I found that eliminating stress was really good for me.  I didn't quite know what I was feeling those first few weeks of unemployment.  It was a strange feeling de-stressing.  It was not something I really recognized.  I started feeling what I think was a little happiness maybe?  I was definitely not feeling stressed.  I started to reconnect with some old friends I never had time to get together with.  I started to play tennis.  I never had the time to join a team before.  I had time to volunteer.  I had time to make people connections.  In my job, I maintained friendships of course.  I kept in touch with family members of course.  But it was not fulfilling.  I realize, I was going through the motions.  Now I really took time in my conversations.  I really listened because I was not trying to multi-task.  I realized that I was a different person.  I was not a negative Nelly.  I was not a depressed person in need of drugs.  I was not highly stressed.  I was not down on myself.  I was not down on the world.  I was seeing life so differently and there were many things to discover about myself.  But for someone who spent too much of her life seeing the glass as half empty, I was more often than not seeing the glass as half full.  I was seeing possibilities instead of impossibilities.