In comments, Shaker CassieC writes:I was wondering if there could be a thread for shakers to share what this recession/depression/catastrophe is doing to them and their friends and loved ones. ... I've just been reading people's accounts here and there, on various threads, and I know how strong the pressure is not to tell these stories of personal difficulties in the US, because of our society's f-ed up code of personal success/failure, which makes it so difficult for the personal to be seen as a collective, legitimate phenomenon. Here it is.
via shakespearessister.blogspot.com
D and I are not in as desperate straits as some of the folks posting here, but we are both currently unemployed, with no work visible on the horizon. To say that we're worried is an understatement. My own contribution to the thread is copied here below the fold.
I've been working my way slowly through this thread, because I can only read two or three stories before needing to stop and take a break.
My husband and I are in a sort of denial/fugue about our situation right now. I've been basically un/underemployed since 2003, when the academic market in my field collapsed around me, and aside from one year, I've not been employed full-time anywhere since. It's been bits and pieces of academic jobs, temp work, and whatever freelancing I can scare up (which hasn't been much). My financial contribution to our relationship (now marriage) has mostly been in the form of things like internet and groceries, which we do have the fortune to have, but... it's been challenging for me knowing that if I - let alone we - was the sole source of income, we'd be homeless right now. I have some savings that I inherited a while back, but I've been drawing from it to compensate for my pitiable income (I made about $3000 last tax year) and I worry about being a lonely old lady someday with no one and no funds to take care of me.
Because my ability to find work (I have a doctorate in a field that's glutted right now, and that doctorate, coupled with my irregular work history, tends to scare off just about every employer I've contacted except the temp agencies (who get excited by it, but then can't find me work)) we've been depending on my husband's income to keep things going. The problem is that while his field (he's also an academic in my broad area) is more common than mine, the market overall is in the tank and is getting worse. We've been living off several strings of adjunct jobs, where we count our blessings if we don't have to move at the end of the year. This year we actually had the hope of a tenure-line job held out to him - he was adjuncting at a place with colleagues that really seemed to like and appreciate him, to the point of asking him to write the job description for the tenure-track version - and then they decided to hire someone else, someone who hadn't even applied for that particular job, and whose main field was in another area entirely. And the whole time they kept spinning fairy rainbows around him, reassuring him that he had nothing to worry about. Can you tell that I'm still bitter about this?
So, anyway, he's been applying for every single job that vaguely resembles something he does, and it's been horrible watching every one come to nothing. I already had to deal with my own stress about "failing" the academic market, and now he's going through that same process. Adding to our anxiety, we've finally decided that we must make a real effort to start a family now or else it won't happen (I'm 41), and so far it's not going well. I can't help but think that the stress isn't helping, and I'm really upset to think that this may be one more thing that I screwed up on. Plus the issue of health care and insurance and the probability of increased maternal risk has me freaking out (though I try to keep it to myself).
At the moment I have an application in for a job that would be amazing if I got it, but I'm doubtful about even getting an interview (though we will be buying me an interview suit next weekend - it says something about my job history that the only one I currently own is over ten years old and no longer fits). We've decided that we must move to a more populous urban area if we're to have any hope of finding even part-time work - the area we live in has nothing to offer, literally - but that brings it's own headaches in terms of having to budget for a smaller, more expensive place, the cost of the move, and so on.
Now, in some ways, we have it pretty good. We can move, and we have families willing to support us (my parents have even offered us the apartment space in their house to live in), and we're healthy and so on.
But I look at the future, and I think about how we did everything we were supposed to do, and it's looking like our lives in our forties and fifties are going to look like what our parents' did when they were newlyweds fresh out of college - but without the hope of anything getting better. We take it one step at a time, and hope that the days when anxiety and depression hits especially hard that it's just one of us, so that the other can step up to provide the needed comfort. It sucks.
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