on being unemployed
I didn’t expect unemployment to give me anything.
For the first few months, it mostly felt like it had taken something away.
I had always been a workaholic. I was used to having somewhere to be, something that needed to be done, a schedule that told me whether I was making good use of my day. So suddenly having months with nowhere I needed to be didn’t feel like freedom.
It made me feel lost.
Useless, sometimes.
I think I had gotten so used to measuring my days by how productive I had been that I didn’t really know what to do with a day that asked nothing from me.
Eventually, though, I started filling the time.
I started editing videos on CapCut. Nothing important, just little videos I wanted to make look a certain way. And somewhere in the middle of doing that, I remembered that I used to do this when I was younger.
I can’t even remember exactly what program I used. Some Microsoft video editor, probably. I would put pictures together, add music, type subtitles over them, and make what was essentially a glorified slideshow.
They weren’t remarkable.
I just loved making them.
Then there was HTML and CSS.
I’ve written about this before, but I originally learned bits of them for the very serious childhood responsibility of customizing my MySpace page. I wanted different colors and backgrounds and layouts, so I figured out enough code to make the internet look the way I wanted it to.
Now I’m learning them again.
Not for MySpace this time, obviously. But I’m tinkering with my own little corner of the internet again, changing things just because I want to see if I can.
And then there’s writing.
That one has probably been around the longest.
I kept diaries. I wrote stories. I wrote one-shots and fiction on Wattpad. I wrote things nobody needed me to write and things hardly anyone would ever read.
And now I’m writing again.
Somewhere along the way, I started journaling too. My table has slowly accumulated notebooks, pens, scraps of paper, printed photographs and whatever other supplies I’ve decided are absolutely necessary this week.
The funny thing is that none of this feels entirely new.
It feels like remembering.
I don’t think I ever consciously decided to stop doing these things. There wasn’t a final diary entry where I announced that I was finished writing, or a last little video I knew would be my last.
I just started adulting.
Work took up more of my time. There were responsibilities. I got busy. And the things I did simply because I enjoyed making something became easier and easier to put aside.
Eventually, I forgot that I missed them.
That’s probably the strangest thing this period of unemployment has given me.
Time, obviously. More of it than I knew what to do with at first.
But also enough quiet for old parts of me to become noticeable again.
I don’t want to romanticize unemployment. I still want to work again. There are parts of this season I would happily do without, and I certainly didn’t need several months of uncertainty just to remember that I like writing in notebooks.
But I’m grateful that something I initially experienced entirely as a loss ended up returning things to me too.
Editing. Writing. Designing things. Making things for no particularly useful reason.
They’re different now. CapCut instead of whatever Microsoft program I was using. My own website instead of MySpace. A commonplace book instead of the diaries I used to keep.
But I recognize the person doing them.
Apparently she was still here.
She’d just been busy.