Almost 10 months

I would have been unemployed for 10 months as of May 30th. That's enough time to really start to doubt whether or not you posses any skills or intelligence at all and whether anyone will ever want to hire you again, even when you're smart, funny, cute, house trained and can figure out things by yourself. It's enough time that your self esteem plummets and your weight rises to catastrophic heights.

Being unemployed is scary. Because I left my old job by personal choice, I wasn't eligible for unemployment benefits in either Kentucky or Connecticut. We don't get any help from either set of parents, which I'm moderately proud of. My family's rule is that once you're married, you're cut off... not for financial reasons, but because if you're married they assume you're an adult, which means you get to deal with things yourself... and that really sucks when you're faced with a $5k hospital bill from emergency surgery 3 days before Christmas. Thank God for health insurance, because without it we would have been $20,000 in the hole instead of just $5k. It'll work out, but still, I don't like it. If push had come to shove, they would have gladly helped out but until we were in dire straits (eating ramen), we were and are on our own.

I went about unemployment the wrong way; I should have volunteered somewhere, taken a part -time job, gotten involved in my new community, taken a knitting class like I wanted to and I definitely should have joined a gym. Instead I read most of the internet and sat on my butt, moped, talked to my friends that were 800 or 1000 miles away and spent a lot of time at Ikea (which is 4 miles away from my house).

All that being said... I'm employed as of next Thursday. I have a job that pays decently well for the time being, a job that will open a lot of doors for me and give me good experience for the future. I don't have a master's degree yet, but I also don't have any student loans that have to be paid off right this minute and a husband who is making it his priority to get me back to school so I can get into a good program by boosting my GPA. Our living expenses are minimal because of two things, despite living in the third most expensive state in the US. I don't have a shopping problem, not only because I hate having to deal with people, but also because I realize that it's not necessary to buy clothes that I don't need. We don't go out to eat that often because I'm back to eating like a normal, healthy person but also it takes a lot of willpower for me to pass up good food at good restaurants. It helps that I only have to drive once a week to the (5) grocery stores I go to, but I mainly attribute us being able to hold on as long as we have by being smart with money and not spending unnecessarily.

New jobs are scary too, though. You're walking in to a totally new situation in which you don't know the dynamic of your co-workers, how well they get along, what kind of jokes they tell, who you can trust and who you definitely can't trust with your lunch. You don't know what kind of managers you're going to have-whether they're boozy passive-aggressive good-for-nothings or fun, energetic and motivating humans with a wonderful sense of humor and a great soul. You don't know the minuet details of your responsibilities, your schedule, or the answer for every question you might have. You learn, but that first day is the scariest thing ever, like the first day of school but WORSE because you don't have any friends that came back from last year. I still miss my Big Corporate Bookstore coworkers something terrible and probably always will- except the one I married, of course. But like the saying goes, "you can't go home again"... especially since today, my former company was offered $1 billion dollars for a 70% share of the company by Liberty Media Corporation and in the last two weeks, 12 former coworkers have left the store, including my former store manager.

I can't go home again, but I can build a new one and as much as it hurts to be so far away from the two cities and people I love, we're here in the Northeast now and probably for the next several years. I strangely am okay with that. I have a sense of optimism I haven't felt in a long, long time and it's both exciting and scary.