Being Unemployed

I was laid off in May and have been unemployed for two months.  So now I understand a little bit better what people have been going through the last several years.  I still haven't lost my insurance or unemployment benefits, so I still don't really understand.

But I've gone from barely scraping by to not quite.  I still don't know what poverty is and I still don't know how bad it can get, but I'm beginning to understand how it feels to not be able to pay all my bills in a month.  It still feels like a social experiment, like the experiment undertaken by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickle & Dimed, when she pretends not to have her educational background and spends a year working in minimum wage jobs (she tries working at Walmart, as a waitress, and as a maid cleaning houses and hotel rooms) and tries to make ends meet without using any of her usual resources.

So I'm grinning like the Cheshire cat...just waiting for everything to fall into place.  Because I have complete faith that it will, that this is all part of the journey and the plan.

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