Unemployment does something funny to me.
I have worked since I was 15. I helped clean up a local roller hockey rink to play in a league before I was 16, and after that, I’ve worked at numerous fast food, retail, customer service, and office jobs. I’ve very rarely not had at least one job. Even now, while being unemployed, I have a little bit of part-time work before I head out to San Diego.
That’s part of why unemployment bothers me. I haven’t really known what it’s like to be unemployed.
Sometimes I blame employment for any time I had difficulties in school. Now that I look back on it, some of it was indeed detrimental to my performance in school, but I also realize that I wasn’t very good at keeping in touch with my advisers, some of whom were not very good advisers in the first place. My workload next to employment was pretty tough. I should’ve paced myself a bit better, and while I wish I’d been able to only study in college, I don’t necessarily regret working. It was fulfilling, I learned quite a lot, and I made a lot of good friends.
When I have nowhere to be in the mornings or don’t have goals that are outside of solely personal interests, it’s a little bit tougher to get out of bed. Actually, it’s a lot tougher to get out of bed. It’s harder to get motivated to get things done, because I am no longer planning things according to a set of priorities that are more or less out of my control. When I’m employed, it helps my sleep, my diet, and my discipline in general — besides the fact that income is a necessary thing.
I’ll be looking for any kind of employment I can get when I first get to San Diego. My parents always taught me that I’m not above service jobs; while I have a college degree and would prefer not to have to work in the service industry for the rest of my life, I know that I’ll need it to get by. I try very hard to pay a lot of respect to service industry workers because I know that they’re just trying to get by, too, and I knew I’d be back in that position again one day. Fingers crossed, it will only be temporary.
I really, really hope that I’ll be blogging about employment within a month’s time.
(And tweeting less. Apparently I tweet the most when I’m unemployed — see June and October.)
