When No One Knows What to Do With Your New Unemployed Status

Just reaching for another juicy taste of shrimp cocktail, I feel the tap on my back. "Oh heeeyyy! How are you?" It is one of the PR contacts I had dealt with during my years of reporting. Her tight turtleneck seemed to be squeezing the wire thin smile across her face.

"Great, Abby! Good to see you," I say. "How are you?"

"No complaints. This is my husband Mitch," she lovingly nudges a wispy-haired guy in a grey sweater. He extends his hand and we shake.

"So, rumor has it you left your job. What are you doing now?" Abby inquires.

"I haven't quite figured it out yet. I think I may travel, and really just give myself some time to breathe."

"Huh," Abby says, and stares at me. "So nothing lined up?"

I shrug and smile. "No. I've never had time off like this before, and I think it will be a good chance for me to really figure out my passion, you know?"

Despite the din of the party, I feel like there is a deafening thud. I immediately begin to regret being honest with someone who seems to take themselves so seriously. They both look at me, genuinely puzzled. Mitch starts to get a glazed-over look, as his eyes drift over to the cheese plate. Abby emits a forced grin, and starts flicking her chin length brown hair, a move which looks remarkably similar to a chicken pecking at feed.

'Well, that's interesting. Good luck with that," Abby replies in a quick, shrill laugh. I'm not quite sure what is so funny. Then she allows her husband to drag her in the direction of the cheese plate.

"Great. Thanks. I will. And good luck to you too."

Standing there, by myself, I think time to go. But go where? This is my formal, first (and one of many) rejections from the Conventional Club, a club which seems to have an extensive membership. It's not as if I want to join. If anything, I feel as though I have been a part of it, and am now discontinuing my membership.

The reaction is predictable. I suppose I am just not as prepared for how annoying it is. Whether you are laid off, or leave an unbearable job on your own, people don't know what to do with that. As you try to adapt to your situation, additional armor is needed to deflect the snide remarks or insinuations of others.

'What do you do? Or what are you doing now?' are seemingly innocuous icebreakers layered with curiosity, a search for commonality, and an assessment of social status. How 'well' you answer can determine the course of a conversation. Depending on how much I like someone and have the energy to continue to 'chat', I tailor my answer. Regardless, I know I can't say 'nothing'. Such nonchalance can be seen as dismissive or insulting (not necessarily a bad thing for strangers). But it can create a potential hazard if dealing with hypersensitive family members, or well-intended friends. When dealing with card carrying members of the Conventional Club, understand that you just have to be mentally prepared.

The force of the Conventional Club is strong, dominant, and hard to elude. But the good news is, the more you are ok with it, the easier it is to simply say that you left your membership behind. You'll find that their reaction says more about them than you...

Comments

[Schaz]

I'm afraid what you're encountering is the dry-land version of fear that the person next to you is about to drown -- they don't want you to take them down with you. Being unemployed (whether it's by choice or not) isn't contagious; it just feels that way to everyone who secretly fears being in that spot themselves.

[camb94]

Tell people you have retired. Most people are in so much debt that they are truly amazed that anyone can not have a "conventional" job

[marmosetto]

One of the less exhilarating challenges of taking "time off" has been figuring out which precise combination of three sentences will adequately (and attractively) describe my complicated situation.

Here's the problem: we live in a soundbyte-hungry culture, and also a culture in which people, if they don't identify with their jobs entirely, allow their jobs to define them. This unfortunate combination of attitudes puts me in a difficult position, because I neither celebrate small talk nor believe the repetitive tasks we perform for money are necessarily the best encapsulations of who we are.

So when it comes to my soundbyte, I have yet to even approach a crude working version. Whenever someone asks me what I'm doing with my life - a question I am for whatever reasons acutely aware of being asked about 50 times more often than ever before in my life - I scramble to find the right combination of words and then stretch them like a veil over the emptiness behind them. It rarely works. Nothing I say is ever good enough; nothing stands on its own.