The whole reason I moved to San Francisco in the first place was to have fun, and at that moment, at a bar with my friends on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, I was having a lot. Thirty minutes earlier I had been laid off from my job, and in an unremarkable dive in the Haight I was celebrating my new status as a member of the subcultural elite: I was “funemployed.”
I had made it to that magical realm between jobs, the one where you get to sleep in and soul search and lay around in the park drinking Cook’s at 1 p.m. Unfortunately, I was not the kind of funemployed you get to be when you quit a job because you don’t like it, and I was not the kind of funemployed you get to be when you have a killer savings account or someone supporting you. I was abruptly let go.
It wasn’t until the following two and half years were over, after 30 months of trying to convince myself that I was unquestionably resilient, that I realized those funemployment years were the most stressful years of my life.
THE PRICE OF GUILT
The problems began immediately, right there in the bar. For the first
time I had to ask: How much do I tip this bartender, who is also a
friend, a friend who I’m also sleeping with, who just gave me a free
drink? Money may come and go, but social contracts don’t, and
now that I had to watch what I was spending, I wasn’t sure what to do.
I went home and immediately applied for unemployment. If I couldn’t
find work for a few months, this would help. Everything was going
to be just awesome.
“Awesome,” in literal monetary terms, turned out to be $1,000 a month.
My rent was $950. In the hierarchy of expenses that had to be cut,
Netflix, vinyl collecting, and my CSA delivery were abandoned in round
one. I began freelancing. I pulled in about $1,000 a month pitching
stories and copywriting.
This might be an appropriate time to touch on guilt. I lost a massive
support network when I lost my job, making it all the more vital to get
out and connect with friends. But we all know “doing something
cheap” means using your stomach as a grocery bag and filling it with
$60 worth of burritos, beer, and Humboldt Fog. Alongside the weight
of the expense piggybacked the insidious feeling that I did not currently
have the right to be having fun. If I were truly responsible, then I would
be at home looking for work.
Counting the loSsES
Guilt expertly packed and stored, it was about two months before I found out that I had to declare my freelancing income against the unemployment I received, and so my earnings cancelled out my benefits. Apparently, regardless of whether I worked really hard or not at all, the result would be the same. I lapsed into existential crisis for a weekend, surfaced, and pulled myself together. I kept applying for jobs. No one called.
I cancelled my renters insurance. I stopped buying gas. I stopped buying meat. I told everyone the vegetarian thing was for health reasons, with the added benefit that I felt more environmentally responsible. The reality was that just about everything behind the butcher counter was too expensive.
I found a part-time job in a winery and took it. I couldn’t fork out the $2 to ride Muni across town, but I could bring $65 bottles of wine to dinners, thus perpetuating my legend as the free-spirited Lucky One.
The winery gig had another benefit that I initially didn’t see. I had a respectable out in a social situation that leaves the unemployed hopelessly tongue-tied when someone asks, “So, what do you do for a living?”
Loss of identity is a killer. I realize I don’t have to let my job define me; I’ve been given that advice before. But having my job define me is something I desire more than almost anything. What a privilege to align the things you feel inside with the things you do. What an accomplishment.
There is nothing else in the world that gives me the satisfaction of working in editorial. But if that’s the way I really felt about it, then why couldn’t I get a job doing it? When pride didn’t motivate me to spin things in a positive light, fear of failure did. I told everyone I worked in a winery. Everyone resoundingly approved.
Creative financing
Living on a grand a month was coming up on its 18-month anniversary.
I cancelled my car insurance. I looked up the Blue Book value of my car.
Thinking about selling my Jeep was heartbreaking — I loved that thing.
I had driven it across the country many times, which is also how I knew a
Jeep could be comfortably slept in should the necessity arise. I hung
onto it.
I had never had health insurance, but I counted that as a small victory —
I didn’t have to wrap my head around losing it. Wi-Fi existed by the
grace of my roommate. He never asked me outright to help with the bill,
and in doing so upheld the other unspoken end of the funemployment
agreement — he spared me the embarrassment of saying I can’t pay for this.
Just as I cancelled my renters insurance, our apartment got broken into,
and I now had no way to replace my stolen laptop or bike. I was more
broken up about the bike than the laptop. I had purchased it for practical
purposes, back when I gave up on gas, and not even unemployment feels
as “free” as riding down Montgomery at night. That bike is what finally made
me quit smoking. It was gone. I looked around and realized I couldn’t afford
my empty apartment either. I decided to “get creative.” I walked across
the street, bought a $10 cup of bacon from a food truck, sat on the curb,
and pondered.
Moving mountains
I sublet my apartment for the winter and moved to Truckee, where a bedroom in a house cost a fraction of my rent. I commuted to the winery on weekends, and my salary covered the gas for the trip. None of my city friends were living in the mountains. I was completely free from the expense of my usual social obligations, and no one was the wiser. Then, two and a half years after I started looking for a job, and hundreds of miles from home, I got a call. It was for a full-time editorial position at an online company. After almost two months of interviews, callbacks, and waiting by the phone, I was hired. I reclaimed my apartment in the city, packed up my winter coat and my lucky cactus (RIP), and headed back to the Bay. It was good to be home.
Interestingly, it wasn’t until many years later that the weight of pretending to have it so good during that time smothered me. A friend of mine was telling me he admired me. That I lived the life I wanted, that I could just go to the mountains, study wine, write when I felt like it. He had fully bought into the myth that I perpetuated, and I started crying. He had no idea how hard I had worked, how persistent I was, how desperate the situation had become, and it was largely because of me.
Conventional wisdom would have you believe that pride is best represented by a lion, but after this experience I tend to think of it more like a raccoon that’s been picking through my garbage, spreading it down the street, pissing off my next door neighbor. Every day I would clean up my house, and every morning I’d wake up and the shit would be blowing everywhere. The financial ruin is something I have been slowing and steadily repairing, but the experience of having to pretend that being robbed of identity, purpose, responsibility, and personal worth was somehow insignificant has proven a much more difficult thing to mend. I never want to be funemployed ever again.
