The Sadder Side of (F)unemployment.

Barely being able to make financial ends meet and taking constant employment rejection can be all fun and games. Indeed, there’s about a million blogs out there on the very subject. Learning to laugh at the lengths I will go to for a cheap meal or the four-year degree I’m using to fold napkins is really the only way to get through it.

Everyday the newspaper runs articles on recent graduates unable to find employment. The television is absolutely littered with the unemployment rates and the failing economy. There are a million out there, just like me-- toiling away in the constant search for what one 90’s punk song so easily phrased, “Oh, why don’t you go get a job?”

So, why does it feel so personal? It’s like a break up. Every single person has gone through the completely heart wrenching experience of ending a relationship for as many relationships that they have had. Every single person that every single person has loved has somehow managed to tear their life apart, with the exception of the person they are with right now.

Breaking up is possibly one of life’s most common experiences.
And yet, when it happens to you, it’s like no one else could possibly understand how immediately personal and unique the kind of pain you’re feeling is. I spend an exorbitant amount of time reading articles on better ways to find employment, published and printed for the masses of jobless citizens. I follow several hilarious and poignant unemployment blogs, written by the ever-so-unemployed. I try to help my boyfriend find further employment as the season causes his hours to diminish.

The whole world around me is sinking in the quicksand of the effects of underemployment. But most of the time, the hopelessness feels as lonely as a break up. The dark days after a slammed door usually send us into hiding, avoiding the outside world and all of their questions. I dodge the “So, what do you do?” inquiry like it might infect me with small pox. When distant family members ask me what I’m doing in Pittsburgh, I ask how their kids are.

My biggest secret is the same secret as almost 16% of the United States, 80% of 2009 college graduates and a constant headline. But, it still feels like no one would understand.