A co-worker of mine asked me to go along while she shopped for a new outfit recently. Our end of fiscal year bonuses had come through recently (yes, I work for an agency that still gives those!) and she had an upcoming event she was hoping to treat herself to. I was along mostly for the ride (quite literally, as I don't own a car), but ended up buying an outfit for myself as well, since everything was on sale.
That was three days ago. I haven't been able to shake the guilt since.
Spending money has always been an exercise in outwitting guilt for me. I was raised by a notorious penny-pincher, who was herself raised by a Depression era survivor. Bargains, sales, coupon shopping and deals were the dominant sport among the women in my family. But after six years of under- and unemployment those quirks of my familial upbringing have found a new and extended play version in this paradise of regular income that I now inhabit.
Recognizing this has led me to think, hopefully not in too oblivious a fashion, that while jobs are the solution to the unemployment problem, the problems associated with unemployment don't always or even easily go away with that "first day on the job".
Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful to have the job I have. And having a paycheck that is regular removes an enormous stress factor from my daily existence. It is one of the most effective anti-depressants I've encountered in my multiple years of encountering such things.
During the years when I was unemployed I had thought of my situation as being in a hole. There I was stuck, down in the bottom of a really deep hole. I figured I could get myself out of it, if only someone would help, you know, hand me a ladder or a rope to help me work my way out of it. The ladder (and in my case it really was a ladder and not just a "rope"), of course was a job.
Lucky as I was, such a ladder came into my life and I gladly used it, thinking that was my path out of the god-awful hole that I found myself in. So I took what I thought was the first step out; I went back to work. That's when I realized I wasn't really in a hole properly formed with a clear-cut escape route; instead I was actually buried under a mound of mess: debts that had previously been defaulted or were reasonably put aside, a completely obliterated credit rating, no savings, retirement account or assets left, and all of my grandmother's jewelry sold, pawned, traded or otherwise liquidated. I owned nothing, owed much and had a lot of lost ground to make up. I couldn't just climb out with this ladder which my new job offered, I had to first dig myself out of the mess a bit, and actually create a hole to climb out of,.
In my experience, this kind of digging takes a while. And it can do a number on your psyche.
It took me a very long time to learn that a steady paycheck meant I didn't wince each month when it came time to write my rent check, thinking it might be the last one I write. It took me even longer to learn that I could also go to the grocery store AND pay my rent, since there would be another check in the same amount that would come along after the one that covered the rent check. I knew intellectually that employment meant "regular paychecks", but my heart and my anxiety center didn't yet know how to process that "knowledge". It had to "feel" true, before I could eat comfortably, not something that would be obvious to most people, I suspect.
Today, the grocery store is no longer an anxiety-inducing experience, though I still can't walk through the entire store yet, forcing myself only to the "necessary aisles". I hope to some day be free enough to actually stroll down the snack aisle and just observe without spasms of guilt kicking in. But in the grand scheme of things, that's just a hiccough.
After covering the two basic needs of shelter and food in a mostly smooth and neurosis-fear manner, I realized I could begin to approach some of those multi-year defaulted debts and try to start paying them off. And thus began the very slow tug-of-war between creditors. Once I paid off one defaulted debt, all the other creditors came after me at once, given my change in status from terminally unemployed with no income to steadily employed with a small, but regular income. Calmly prioritizing and then selecting which massive debt to start with I scooped more of the mess off of my head and worked to get myself freer of it. This little mound of mess will linger many years beyond my re-entry into the ranks of the employed, but I'm beginning to see a light. My credit rating, on the other hand, is a mess I've not yet begun to tackle. That may linger into my non-existent retirement. (Yet another effect of my unemployment years, one we'll leave for another diary). I believe I'll be at this "overcoming effects" stuff for at least as long as I was unemployed, if not longer.
The hardest thing of all is spending any money on something that is NOT a necessity. For the longest time just deciding to spend the money, to go to a movie, to take a cab home at night rather than wait for the late bus in the dark and isolated street was more than my unemployment-conditioned brain could handle. I avoided the decisions and stayed away from retail opportunities to keep the dissonance and the difficulty at bay. But eventually, surrounded by so-called "normal" (i.e. regularly employed) people, I learned to accept that the money I spent on such things would be replenished so that the decisions didn't carry the same impact that they had in the days when I was unemployed.
In other words, what I've had to do is renegotiate my emotional and psychological relationship to money. Being female, that relationship has never been completely healthy anyway, but being unemployed had sent the dysfunction of it into an alternate universe. I suspect I may be struggling with this consequence for the rest of my days on the planet. One of the unspoken consequences of my time among the nation's unemployed.
So while my days of unemployment have ended, and did so a good 18 months ago, the impact of those days on my life isn't yet gone. And that's not something I've seen a great deal of discussion about when examining the unemployment figures. In pushing our political leadership to encourage the creation of jobs, I hope we don't lose sight of the fact that while unemployment may end with start of a job, the effects of unemployment carry over many months and even years of being back at work. My case is but one, rather limited example. But it suggests that there's more to being unemployed than not having work.
Being unemployed is hard work. Finding a job after being unemployed is even harder. Beyond that there may well be a whole lot of "renegotiating" going on, as those previously unemployed folks learn to reconfigure their relationships to themselves, to the workforce, to money, and even to their futures. All complicated processes that are also harder than they look.