Running

So I'm a runner.

For the last five months, it's been my freedom and maintained my sanity.

Two years ago, I started racing again. After a few 5ks, I set myself a goal to run a half marathon; it seemed a good goal -- long but not dangerously long, difficult but achievable, a challenging yet reasonable training schedule. 

In training, I finally discovered the true joys of distance running. I can try to explain it, but you really have to experience it. The physiological benefits are clear enough: you burn calories, improve muscle tone, increase lung capacity, strengthens the cardiovascular system. It also calms me and helps me focus on work. There's the sense of working toward a goal: with two half marathons under my belt, I have a quite respectable time (I broke 1:45 last June and am eying a late October race for my first real crack at 1:40 -- not setting the world on fire, but quite solid for a casual runner). Distance running also forces you to execute a strategy on the course in a way that running a 5 or even 10k really doesn't. It's a wonderful feeling when you successfully execute your strategy -- and break out from your pace group on mile 10.

But more than any of these things, running gives me autonomy. It gives me an identity. It gives me a purpose. It gives me achievements. All those things that unemployment takes away, running returns a measure.

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.

The Trauma of Going to a Coffee Shop

When you have routine money coming in, there are a considerable number of things that you take for granted -- like being able to stop in to get a coffee at the local cafe, or eating dinner out at a cheap restaurant.  That calculus quickly changes when the paychecks stop.

I've never had much money in my adult life. For my first three years after college, I worked as a journalist running a tiny print paper. After that, I went to graduate school, where the money wasn't great either (though the fringe benefits were quite good -- thanks to the graduate employees' labor union). But in both cases, I had enough to think nothing of dropping $5 on a drink and a delicious concoction containing appropriate amounts of sugar and saturated fatty goodness a few times a week. Grabbing a sandwich for lunch or even an occasional splurge for dinner was no problem either, as long as I kept an eye on the overall budget. And with all these things, I was able to save a modest amount every month for the things that responsible people ought to save for. (Yes, I am extraordinarily lucky NOT to have any student loans.)

That changed about a six weeks ago. I haven't been to a coffee shop since the beginning of July. I only work at home and in libraries. I've paid for one very modest dinner out. I live within walking distance of several interesting museums, but unless they are free (fortunately, several are) I need to think long and hard before plunking down $15 to go inside.

I never spent much on myself, but now I have lost the ability to spend most of that.

 And it's not just spending money on myself -- you can't do nearly as many nice things for other people, either. You can't put as much money as you'd like down in the collection plate at Church. You can't surprise your fiance with a nice dinner out. You have to cut down on gifts for family members.

Two years ago, I budgeted for and sent $200 in donations to Partners in Health, a first-rate charitable and social justice outlet that has brought first-world health care to millions of people in developing countries. Recently, they called and asked if I'd be willing to make a small automatic monthly donation. I wanted to really badly, but I sadly had to tell them "no." I felt like a complete heel.

I want to think of myself as an open-handed person who doesn't have to think about money when important things are on the line. Now I'm realizing that the only people who have that luxury are the ones who already have money.

These are just a few of  the small ways in which unemployment saps your autonomy and your self worth. I'll be talking about more of those in the coming entries. And I'll be talking about the myriad ways that I'm shielded from most of the worst ones thanks to my relatively privileged position.