SWUF: The Trickle Down Effect.
Ed. Note) We are excited to introduce Lesley Pink, an editor and writer who has worked in marketing, financial journalism, and immigration law. She wishes she could swim for a living, but for now you can find her here in her new “Single White Unemployed Female” column. Enjoy.
My bank account isn’t the only thing taking a hit during my first experience with unemployment. My self-esteem is suffering, too.
Of course, I didn’t get all my self-worth from my job, but I did get something out of it. I had a sense of accomplishment, an office, an assistant, and yes, that paycheck. I was being paid for my work and, along with that, my experience and education.
And then that was taken away and my editing background was deemed insignificant, my Masters degree considered [even more] worthless. Since my experience and education didn’t seem to count for anything and since I could be so easily discarded, didn’t that make me, by extension, worthless and expendable?
I have been struggling with these feelings for a couple months now…
Time for some truth. I believe that most nightmares are caused by events that occurred during our waking hours. Situations such as job loss and long term unemployment create mental wounds, and for many of us, those wounds are manifested in nightmares. Sometimes nightmares are a collage of unresolved items that happened during our waking hours. After I wrote Part 3 of Nightmare….Again, I thought about what event could have caused that type of nightmare..jpg)
Some employers especially those in the suburbs are set in their ways and unwilling to budge when it comes to salary offered. For older persons, this could be deadly as well as for local economy.
Time to turn back the clock. The Time: November 2009! The place: Somewhere in Suburban New York. Although I did not have a job offer yet, things were looking promising. I had just completed four interviews. I also had jury duty, and I wondered if there would be a conflict between interview time and jury duty. Somehow I managed to make my way through, but there were some moments that I was very concerned. As the results came in, one company turned down my application and notified me within twenty four hours after my interview. The other interview was for a position I had no experience for. True I could get training, but I wanted to see how the other interviews turned out. The third was one that my headhunter told me that I would definitely get an offer for….That definitely ended up turning into a definitely not, and was the basis for my “Cautionary Tale” writing. The final one…well we’ll get to that one later (as that is where I am now employed).