Getting used to it

As of next Monday, I will have been here exactly 6 weeks...so, I figure that I can say that it's close enough to call it 6 weeks now.

I have finally started to relax.

The down side is that I have also started to relax into being unemployed...and to not feel as frantic about not having a paycheck.

This is probably NOT a good thing.

I've never been off of work for this long. My last day of gainful employment was 9/11!

Even when I lost my job in 1987, I was working again within 2 weeks (AND I also had 2 other, part time jobs at that time as well, so I was never really NOT working).

If I get TOO used to it, I will never want to go back to an office job!

(which, some may remember, I struggled very hard to escape from in the first place, and did NOT want to return to when the economy, and my status as a single person, made it needful!!)

I've gotten used to being home alone all day, and have fallen into a new kind of pattern now. I sleep as long as I can in the morning, then I get up, and go on line to look for a job, then, eventually, I take a shower and dress.

I try to spend at least 3 or 4 hours a day doing job search. I have submitted so many resumes now that I have completely lost track of how many, or of where I have sent them.

Fortunately, one of my job search sites flags the jobs I have applied for through them.

Anyway, then, I have lunch, and, if the weather is nice, I take a walk.
If the weather isn't nice, I try to at least stretch my muscles and do a little bit of exercise of some kind, whether it be dance or just crunches and push ups.

Then, I watch jeopardy, and after that, I start on dinner.

I also keep this place vacuumed, clean, and all of the laundry done. I plan the menus and the shopping lists, and I do all of the meal preparation.

So, being a house wife really IS my job at the moment.

I hated it at first.

Railed against it.

But now, I am starting to settle into it, and that worries me!!

Ideally, I would ADORE being able to be a massage therapist in my own home office, and not have to work a job. Or at least, not a full time office job.

I did that for a number of years, GAINFULLY, during the Clinton administration. It was my dream come true!

But the subsequent changes in the economy, and then my divorce, made it necessary for me to change that up, and get a job with benefits.

Then, my ex fiance made me get a "real job," when he decided that my full time job at the health store, with benefits, was not paying me enough. Little did I know that he did that so that he could dump me.

At least he cared that I wouldn't be able to MAKE it living alone on my health store, and part time massage business, wages.

Anyway, my conscious escape from the corporate world lasted about 10 years. I got to live my dream, and work as a massage therapist full time, for a lot longer than some people ever get to live their dreams.

And now, here I am, struggling every day to go back into a world I do not wish to enter, and finding the world I am IN ever more inviting.

Necessity SUCKS.