Posted by Elizabeth

When my friend, Meghan, visited me a few weeks ago, we were strolling down old Route 66 on a brisk Thursday evening, absentmindedly gazing in glowing storefronts as we talked about the rhythm and structure of our everyday lives.  “What’s a typical day like for you?” she asked me.  I paused, unsure how to answer the question.  The fact is, since I haven’t had a “regular” job in nearly two years, the idea of a “typical day” eludes me.  While I create my own routine and structure, what struck me as I began bumbling my way through a halfway sensible answer was the fact that I haven’t fully embraced the fact that I no longer work for pay outside of the home.

Perhaps it’s why I resonated with a recent article from The New York Times Magazine called Losing It: How I Was Laid Off – and Learned to Love Life Again. Written by former House & Garden editor Dominique Browning, who lost her position when the magazine folded in 2007, she explores what it meant to lose her relationship to work, and build a life centered around, well, living life.  As someone who has not only left the workforce but studied the world of work as a professional, my interest was piqued.  “Work had become the scaffolding of my life,” she writes, and I suppose I was much the same.  I soldiered through two difficult years of graduate school and countless hours of soul-searching to get to where I was going, and when it didn’t work out like I’d hoped, it was – and, to some extent, still is – a difficult thing to simply let go of.  While I didn’t build my identity around my professional title, having a place to go from 9-5 dictated the pace of my life.  As Browning aptly states, weekends meant something different than weekdays, and “now every day was Friday.  Or Monday.  Or Whatever.”

While I have no immediate plans to return to the world of work, I have recently realized that on some unconscious level I still treat my un-employment situation as temporary.  I have avoided buying clothes for years, reasoning “who knows what I’ll be doing next year?”  The commitments I make are largely temporary.  Our budget is regarded as in-flux, although our income hasn’t changed in years.  When someone inquires about my employment status, I feel the need to qualify the statement “I’m not working” with “right now.”  What would it mean, I wonder, to truly accept the fact that I don’t work for pay outside of the home?

Browning talks about her “Forever House,” the home she reluctantly sold after losing her job, the house she thought she’d live in forever.  Shortly after I moved to New Mexico five years ago, my therapist asked me how I liked my job as a career counselor.  I boldly described it as my “Forever Job,” even knowing from my own professional training that people nowadays rarely stay in the same job for their entire careers.  Somehow, I thought I was immune and spectacularly unique.  I was equally convinced that New Mexico was my “Forever Location,” the place I would come to permanently regard as “home.”  As someone who had always been a wanderer, I have no idea why I entertained such wild ideas of permanency.  Perhaps because I thought that was what was most missing from my life, the thing that would provide the missing puzzle piece.  While neither of these scenarios came to pass, I felt as surprised as Browning did to realize that nothing in life is forever.

Although the last year of my life has been guided by living my life “in pencil,” I understand more than ever that I haven’t even begun to live my life in accordance with the reality of my employment status.  In some ways I’m living with one foot out the door, expecting, for no good reason, for my situation to change at any moment.  It’s times like these that I realize I haven’t fully settled into the life I have, that I have a long way to go on my journey.  I am reminded of Browning’s words of acceptance on her own path, which might be a good meditation for me:

One adventure is over; it is time for another
I have a different kind of work to do now
I am growing into a new season.

What circumstances in your own life do you struggle to accept?
Have you ever been met with a particularly difficult unemployment situation – voluntary or not?
How much is your own work linked to your identity?
Do you feel like you’re living your “Forever Situation?”

Check out Browning’s blog, Slow Love Life, here!