The Top Ten Hardest Things about Unemployment

A friend texted me the other day. She’d been more recently laid off than me, and wanted to chat. She said I’d been handling everything so positivity and “with wit and loudness and grace,” which.. I may have to go change and header on my resume again.

Anyway.

It is not all wit and loudness and grace, and it is not all the small victories and side quests. I spent more than a decade of my writing life exclusively writing poetry, so I do prefer to be exacting with my word choice: It sucks.

So here then, are the 10 Hardest Things about Unemployment.

1: A lot of times, I will start some new project or plan or piece and get excited about it and then this wave of sadness and lack of confidence washes over me and I have to go lay down because even sitting feels like impossibly too much work, much less doing anything, and so the thing goes undone and added to the list of things I should or could be doing right now but haven’t yet and I just lay there weighed down by sadness and stare at nothing and tell myself bad stories about myself for giving up and —

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