First day out, last day off

Today was my first day of being unemployed. However, during this last shift that I worked, Mondays were a day off for me. So I allowed myself a day off.

Not that it worked out that way.

The emotional toll of becoming unemployed started to sink in today. Even though I have gone into this eyes wide open, aware of what was going to happen months in advance, with a plan to move on quickly, suddenly the waves of self-doubt and loss of self-worth began to sweep across me.

I actually started the day reconnecting with  a friend who has found herself in a hell of a situation, partly due to her choices and actions, partly due to things beyond her control. I had been meaning to try to get in touch with her today. But somebody else's actions, and somebody else's response to those actions, made that happen faster than I expected.

I hung out some laundry and did some long-overdue yard work. The sunlight wasn't intense enough or long enough to fully dry the clothes. But the branches of the mystery tree infesting the burning bush I planted on a corner of our property twenty or so years ago fell easily to my loppers.

I started polishing my resume. I haven't added my recently-ended job to it yet. I'm still trying to make sense of what went on in 2011.

In February 2007 I was forced out of my position of DVD Asset Manager as my previous employer underwent a contraction. In August of that year I was offered a position as a DVD Press Operator - a significant step down, but a job is a job. That job came to an end in December 2010 when the company underwent another contraction. 2011 is a blur of other things - lots of time spent at CareerLink in Wilkes-Barre, an online class in Solar Power, the death of Franco Kossa, the birth of PA Live! and the NEPA Blogs Blog of the Week (currently on hiatus), the flood of 2011, my first (and, so far, only) actual Sideshow, the momentous and life-changing incidents around the Bloggers' Roundtable at the Vintage Theater in Scranton and the Pages and Places Book Festival, the beginning of my involvement with the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective. But scanning through the entries on my blog, I had a hard time finding much about where I was working.

2011 was a very different time in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The Great Recession, which allegedly ended in 2009, had never really let up here, and the "jobless recovery" was particularly jobless. Jobs were hard to find, and few and far between.

So it looks like after losing my DVD Press Operator job in December 2010, I didn't start working again until October 2011. Even then it wasn't as a full-time employee, but as a "casual" employee at a drastically thinned-out DVD manufacturer (which finally closed its doors for good a few months ago.) Still, I got in a lot of hours and earned a lot of money, for a while at least. By the Spring of 2012 there were fewer and fewer calls for me to come in to work. And then a new job opportunity presented itself, and I wound up working in the travel industry for six and a half years.