Identity theft

In many unspoken ways, your job is a large part of your identity.

When you meet some one for the first time in a social setting, one of the first questions that often comes up is what you both do for a living. You might answer with the profession you're in ("I'm an engineer") or you might talk about where you work ("Oh, I work over at Dell"). Either answer stakes out in a simple sentence a large part of the story of who you are. After all, your job generally is the single thing you spend the largest amount of your waking hours doing. Your job also gives hints to a number of other aspects of who you are as a person: your schedule, your values, your politics, your social class, your higher vocation in life ("I'm a doctor -- I save people's lives")

 When you're unemployed though,  you lose that part of your identity, or at least the ability to easily convey it. That's tough personally. As I type this, I can say I'm a "scholar," but no one really knows what that means in a way that "I'm a professor at X university" does. The latter is translatable, while the former is opaque. I'm still the same (reasonably) intelligent, (hopefully) engaging, (occasionally) witty and (arguably) responsible person I was before. I still have the same experiences that make up much of who I am, but I've lost the ability to convey a lot of those experiences in an easy way. And the things that being "unemployed" do announce about me tends to set me on a lower level in the conversation.

It's not that your job is your whole identity -- nor should it be. However, your job not only signifies a lot about who you are, but also sets a foundation for who you might aspire to be -even if its diametrically opposed to what you currently do.

But right now, I'm not quite sure how to think about what I might want to do, because I'm not officially doing anything for a living. I'm stuck in a holding pattern while I wait for the phone to ring. 

And while you wait, you begin to question your place in the world, because without the identity and purpose a job often provides, you don't know how you fit in.

Without a job, not only is it more difficult to share who I am with everyone else, it's that much more difficult to understand who I am myself.