Unemployed. What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do
It’s hard to keep yourself from slipping into a funk when you are unemployed and uncertain about the future, but you can look at your situation from a different perspective.
There are a good number of us who are unemployed. I’ve been that way for nearly eleven months. It’s not that I haven’t looked for work. It’s that there isn’t a job that suits my talents and interests, or my talents and interests don’t suit prospective employers. Yet, in spite of my lengthy unemployment, two mortgages and other obligations, I’ve survived!
I was pretty devastated when I was first laid off,. Having spent the past thirty years in the corporate world, I wasn’t quite sure how to handle the no-work situation. At first, I became sullen, pensive, and uncertain. One of my friends advised, “When you don’t know what to do, do nothing.” I took her advice quite literally and spent the next couple of months doing much of nothing. But the truth is, I wasn’t doing “nothing.” Well, physically I was doing nothing, but mentally I was doing a lot of thinking and a lot of worrying — mostly about how I could make money to pay the bills . . . think . . . worry . . . think . . . worry. It became a repetitive hourly mantra, and it seemed the more I did of one, the more it escalated the other.
After a couple of months I realized my friend/adviser should have added, “and don’t think, either.” There were times when I stopped thinking, hoping the brief silences would beckon waves of inspiration to put me on course toward work and money. I had brief moments of certainty that synchronicity would surely follow my states of allowing. And the days passed with little encouragement.
I’ve had a change of heart and a change in my outlook since those early days of my unemployment apprenticeship. Today I am still unemployed . . . and lovin’ life. The one change I made that changed everything is to do what I love while I have the time in which to do it. I found my advisor’s words should’ve been: “when you don’t know what to do, do anything.”
The best way to handle your unemployed status is to do what you love and love what you do. This way, you’re in the flow. And when you’re in the flow, everything seems to magically work. It does no good to worry if the bills will get paid. Worry only produces anguish. It does not generate income. Everyone’s in the same financial crunch, and creditors are a bit more understanding. Allow your funds to do what they will. They’ll straighten out on their own, eventually.
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