Unemployment the first time around

Gianna's comments on my post below got me reminiscing about what it was like to be unemployed the first time around.

At 19, I somehow orchestrated my 'escape from psychiatry' as it were, although 'orchestrated' perhaps implies a greater degree of conscious planning than I was capable of at the time. I left my parents' house in the middle of the night, walked to a phone box a few kilometres away and called a friend, who came and picked me up and took me to his girlfriend's - who was less than impressed at having an unexpected house guest. Since staying there was out of the question, the next day they arranged emergency accommodation for me through a local housing program for homeless women. I lived in various safe houses while the social workers got me set up on unemployment benefits and I failed to fill my repeat prescriptions, sweating Prozac, Largactil and friends out onto a bedsheet that even after steam-cleaning looked like the Shroud of Turin. (Excuse the messianic overtones of that simile; it was one that the social workers made.) After a few weeks, I moved to Melbourne, found a share house, and settled into a year of self-medication.

Each fortnight I presented a medical certificate from my GP to the dole office saying I was too depressed to look for work. I may have been theoretically capable of looking for work at the time, but as for actually holding down a job - forget it! I was drinking two litres of wine a day just to stay numb. Casks of rapidly oxidising cab sav and riesling, not to mention Fruity Lexia, the stuff fondly known to Australian teenagers as the demon drink, filled the recycling bin each week, their bladders ripped out and wrung to the last drop.

The following year, as I began to emerge from my stupor, I went back to school (on study benefits), and, as the haze further dissipated, I grew increasingly sick and tired of living in poverty and being subject to the tyrannical ravings of my landlord/housemate. So I decided to get a full-time job - any job - just so long as I could afford to rent my own place and buy some aspirin when I had a headache. (Even the latter was often out of the question while on welfare.)

So, at first, I was motivated primarily by financial considerations. But once I started job hunting - and getting knockback after knockback - like Gianna, I too, suddenly felt like I needed to explain myself to the employed. In fact, I felt like the cast-off cocoon of an especially ugly moth. I eventually became near-delusional to the extent that I was terrified that one particular person I had dealt with in the mental health system was behind every knockback I received - that he was somehow popping up everywhere and saying "Don't hire her, she's nuts." The fact that he was (presumably still) employed, and I wasn't further served to underline what I thought would be my eternal marginalisation. I was in a constant state of paranoia and panic, with no one but me to talk myself out of the myriad stupid things I felt like doing as this idée fixe threatened to overwhelm me. At its worst, it seemed like everything, every window, every copy of every newspaper, every coke machine was his; even my own clothes sat on me reluctantly like a thoughtless shoplifting haul. His fifty thousand brothers and sisters sneered at me from behind the counter at McDonalds, and there was no sooking to Lifeline because he was always posing as the bleeding heart at the other end of the line.

After three months of applying for anything up to a dozen positions a week, breathing deeply in elevators on the way up to interviews and asking myself what are the odds, what are the odds? I finally landed a job as a filing clerk. Apart from a couple of weeks over the Christmas break after I was laid off a few years ago, I've been in full-time work ever since. I don't think I can feasibly swear that I'll never work full-time again, but perhaps I could do with a break now.