Posthumous diary of an unemployed

I started unrooted in the midst of my unemployment crisis, around the time that I had moved from the automatic feeling of the absolute deepest depths of desperation (and other dark emotions), to a slightly more conscious feeling of the deepest depths of desperation (and more dark emotions). Having become a little bit conscious of them, I sometimes saw the funny side of these ridiculous but magnetic thoughts such as ‘i will never find a job and end up under a bridge’ and ‘maybe all the HRs in my field have put my name in a permanent black-list’ (more examples below, under ‘index of the dark emotions during unemployment’). Unemployment added a thick layer of unrootedness to my existence, especially given my significant confusion about the direction I wanted (ideally) to take in my career. It pushed the unrootedness from a level I had gotten used to, having dealt with its stealth for a good 30+ years, to a level where it re-crystallized in a newly acute state. I’m not ready to say that I’m grateful for my unemployment period, the scars are still too fresh. However, if I imagine myself one day being grateful for it, certainly being the reason to start closely appraising my unrootedness and writing about it - would be one good reason to be thankful. The big question then, which I touched upon already in the previous post, is whether becoming once again employed will now push the unrootedness back under the threshold of consciousness.

In fact, and now I expect a wave of un-subscribes, aghast at my arrogant boasting - many things in my life are currently moving in the direction of inclusion: job, recently acquired citizenship in the country I’ve lived for a while and plan to stay in for another quite long while, ability to speak the majority official language of said country on a somewhat decent level and thus be less excluded from professional and private conversations. Does moving towards inclusion also mean moving away from exclusion? Will this translate to a deeper incorporation of the feeling that I belong, that I am indeed rooted?

I first came accross an intentional consideration of belonging through the work of Brené Brown, who herself referred to and was inspired by Maya Angelou’s descriptions of it:

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.”

Indeed I do feel that I belong no place at all, but this feels more like nebulosity than freedom. And so I read this in 2020 and understood it not at all. It remained a thorough mystery for a long time, together with Brené’s understanding of it:

“Belonging is being part of something bigger than yourself. But it’s also the courage to stand alone, and to belong to yourself above all else”

However, unlike other things that are beyond me where my brain quickly categorizes it: ‘too complex, forget all about it’ - this one did not leave me alone. I wouldn’t say I thought about it on a daily basis. Or even weekly. But over the years it did come back periodically: Belonging is belonging to no place at all. Belonging is belonging to yourself… but nope! Still doesn’t make sense. Belonging to myself - just sounds like the same old loneliness that’s been courting and following me all my life. Belong to myself because no one else will have me?!

At this point, you might expect some grand life-turning event that suddenly turned the brain-cogs in the right way and a bright illumination of understanding dawned upon me: aha! that’s what Maya and Brené meant by belonging! Hmm, let me think about it a bit more. No, I don’t think life-turning illumination happened. I still find the definitions are quite abstract and hard to think about, but my intuitive grasp of them goes along the lines of:

1. A bit like happiness, belonging is a choice. Being happy becomes exceedingly hard when you live in poverty and coercion. However, people who have it all can still be unhappy and similarly people with lots of friends, community, meaningful career can still feel lack of belonging. The more signs of rejection you face in your life, the harder you need to work at belonging. At a certain point belonging has to stem from the inside, no amount of external validation will do the trick. The stronger your inner belonging, the more rejection-like cues you can take before you interpret it as illustrating your un-belonging.

2. In a more general sense, to connect to someone else you need to connect to yourself. An attitude of acceptance mirrors in both directions. You don’t always need to start with yourself: the trajectory towards self-acceptance, when you start from a point of feeling very down, can be easier start with showing kindness to others - I’ve previously written about this in my self-forgiveness post.

This is all getting awfully abstract so lets put it in the context of my life. I have close to no national belonging, I’ve never belonged to a cult (thank god!), had any strongly defining hobbies or music genres that have become part of my identity, I didn’t grow up in either a tight-knit extended family or one of those friendship groups that are still laughing at their own teenage shenanigans when they meet up regularly in their 40s and 50s. The thing that has given me belonging until recently was being part of the group of scientists who move country every couple of years, work weekends and/or nights, are both obsessed and constantly disappointed with p-values and despite all the tribulations are motivated by the process of discovery and bound to each through these exact struggles. Despite an underlying feeling of belonging to academia, each day offered plenty of opportunities to choose between belonging or self-exclusion. The prevalence of imposter syndrome is infamous in academia, and I was no exception. Therefore, overall I did more often chose to interpret my scientific results, grant application outcomes, hearing about other people’s results and achievements, as well as a multitude of other interactions with colleagues as non-belonging. Despite feeling already such an outsider, leaving the field was still a shock - an existential crisis of being unemployed, out of academia and out of the only community that gave me a sense of belonging for 12+ years. Which brings us to the:

Index of the dark emotions during unemployment*:

1. Bitterness: possibly the most prominent, most unfashionable but also somehow fascinating emotion during this period. Sometimes triggered by as little as observing a fellow public transport commuter wearing a work access card. A equal mix of envy (for example triggered by new job updates on Linkedin) and shame (feeling fundamentally flawed), but covered externally by a thin veneer of self-righteousness (the world has rejected and ex-communicated me but it’s not my fault - a great injustice has led to this, however I will not stoop so low as to explain this to anyone therefore better I stay alone as much as possible, stonewalling society without anyone else being vaguely aware of my stonewalling). During the worst period, bitter thoughts became the default song-on-repeat whenever I had no urgent tasks to attend to.

2. Shame. Even on the days that I could keep remembering the fact that I’m among a many unemployed scientists and its the job market which is pretty thin right now, not my capabilities, I still got continuously haunted by a comparison of whatever inadequate productivity I was achieving on this particular day with what I could be doing: submitting multiple high-quality job applications and meaningful career networking and local language learning and that python course that I subscribed to coursera for and volunteering and writing up my academia articles that are still not done and cooking a healthy lunch for myself everyday and getting my exercising done for the day before 5pm so I could spend the evening uninterrupted with my family.

3. With all these options I predictably suffered from chronic indecisiveness… driven mostly by:

4. Fear

5. Low energy

6. Feeling untethered due to excessive freedom from external commitments

*originally this was intended to be a separate, more extensive post, but since I only made very brief notes on these states at the time when I noticed them, remembering enough details of these emotions to write about them is now becoming a challenge.