Tag: depression

i am failing at enjoying life (or, don’t quit your day job)

My freelance smoggy rainbowwork is slow, and since leaving my part-time day job five months ago, I have little to do that’s enjoyable. I wish I could have a do-over and take my job back, because after all the complaining I’d done about one supervisor and how things had gone to pot, things changed after I left. A new supervisor is at the helm, and all is good at the old place. If only I’d stayed.

So here I am with a serpentine schedule, some days going left, others going right. Some people would give their eye teeth to have a flexible schedule. They’d take up a hobby or continue with one they have and love. They’d travel, laptop in hand, and work whenever it was convenient to them, maybe looking out over a vast ocean or a forest filled with ferns and canopies of green. Maybe they’d squeeze in volunteer work, helping their fellow man and woman by serving food or rocking babies. They’d possibly simply take time to breathe, thanking their lucky stars for the time they have left on this earth.

But I’m not there yet. I’m sad, and after learning last week of a chronic illness I have, I’m depressed as well. The work I now have is not the work I love. I haven’t had the editing work that sustains my being in over a year. I feel I made a mistake in quitting the part-time job too and wish I had somewhere to go during the day to make my time feel valuable. I tried to get my old job back after another coworker left, but it’s obvious that the new manager does not want to make it work, even when he had an effortless opportunity to do so.

So I’ll trudge on, hoping something comes of the jobs I’ve applied to and interviewed for in recent weeks. There is hope over the rainbow. At this point, though, I’m just waiting for the rain to end.

how being underemployed can result in a whole lot of wasted time

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I am underemployed. If I could just be paid for the time I waste looking for work, I’d have a healthy five-figure salary.

I work freelance, and for the duration of the time I’ve had little ones–and not so little ones–at home, it’s been a great thing. I could be here for the children and also be able to bring in a few extra bucks. Fast-forward twenty-five years, though, and what was once a wonderful thing is now holding me back and keeping me from moving in the right direction.

There are so many jobs I know I could do if just given the opportunity, but picking up crumbs of jobs that require copious amounts of time to do them is all I can find right now. And I’ve been looking.

I applied for a full-time job last week that I felt I was perfect for. I still see the job up on the company website, therefore, the company didn’t see me as a perfect fit. (I think the salary-requirements line tripped me up, not having any idea what real people make out there.) In addition to applying for jobs, I keep working toward getting a certificate to make me more marketable for a government-agency job, but those jobs, after having applied, can take months and months to get called back on. There is no rhyme or reason as to how people are selected for interviews, although the county’s website says that people are phoned alphabetically. Great. I’m in the middle of the alphabet (which makes me want to hyphenate my maiden and last names. I used to be a “B.”)

So today I sat down at my computer and, not having received any work again, looked at the work-at-home job sites. I found one job that looked interesting. It’s with a company that requires candidates to input metadata (whatever that is). I took the test, being that I’m good at tests and am uber proficient in editing and researching, which was part of the test. After two and a half hours of working on this three-hour exam, which partially included identifying pop culture figures and events, I was switching between open tabs in my browser when–oh, lord–I accidentally clicked on the horrible, no-good, very bad X, closing out the tab and losing all the work I had input.

I tried to recover the page, but it had flown into cyberspace for good. So I restarted the test. Having done a lot of the research already, I had half the battle won this second time around. It was a matter of remembering and, if I couldn’t do that, looking back into what I had originally researched. In the meantime, I was supposed to be watching and listening in on a webinar being presented for that certificate I’m going after. I was able to do both, albeit half-heartedly. Still, I managed and was pretty proud to have multitasked those efforts and while picking up a phone call from my husband, to boot.

After the webinar ended, having made good time on the test the second time around, I focused my mind on it and was nearly finished within two hours. I just couldn’t figure out the identities of two of the people who were featured. I tried to research some more but had no luck. So I reread and reworked some of the longer questions that needed my attention.

When I thought I had finished the entire test, I submitted it. Trouble is, I’d forgotten to fill in one of the answers–the name of some pink-bikini clad woman standing on a beach while holding a microphone as some performers were singing on a stage in the background. (Can anyone place that?) Everything else was perfect, trust me. But I knew I was doomed. I knew this was going to be one of those tests graded by a machine, whose first role was to make sure there were no blank answers. And what do you know, within minutes of punching the damned Submit button, I received a ding saying I didn’t get the job. All because of one idiotic semi-celebrity whom I couldn’t ID. No human at this company even bothered to read my answers.

What ticks me off the most is that five hours were wasted. Five hours. I didn’t even walk the dog within that time, which is something I do every morning. I hadn’t even showered. I looked at the clock and it was after 1 p.m. when I got dinged. I realized that I hadn’t gotten up from my chair since 8 in the morning. Five hours wasted because I don’t have a full-time job–or even a regular part-time job–to call my own. If I made twenty bucks an hour, that would have been one hundred dollars I could have earned.

It’s not just the money–or potential loss of it–that is so bothersome, it’s what I could have done with my time. This has been a really slow two weeks for me. Make that three or four weeks, actually. Last week I got some painting done in the house, but this week I was hoping to get some paid work. Only it never came. So after sitting at my desk and feeling like I wasted precious days in the beginning of the week, I promised myself yesterday that I’d get out of the house today. The weather has been stifling hot and my office is the hottest room in the house, and I promised I wouldn’t make myself sit and pine away, clicking through website after website to look for work one more day this week. I told myself I’d get out and get some fresh air.

But when you are at the mercy of others for work, a job can come at the least-expected time. It can pop up when you’re walking the dog or getting some fresh air or sitting in an air-conditioned coffeeshop sipping a pumpkin latte. So I’m sorry to say that I probably have a lot more disappointingly slow, unproductive days in my future as long as I can’t find a regular job. I won’t stop looking for freelance work too, but I sure as heck won’t take another five-hour test to get it. I worked backwards today. And that’s never the right direction.

underemployed waitress.jpg
“I have a B.A. in journalism and 30-plus years of experience.”

work-at-home depression–yes, it is a thing

Some people–a lot of people, actually–would think that the perfect job is one in which you get to stay home and still earn money. That sounds good to me too, but working at home is not all it’s cracked up to be. And here’s why.

Working from home can be awesome, especially if you have young children or a difficult time commuting. It’s also great if your schedule is ever changing, like if you’re a student and have a hard time fitting a work schedule around classes. There are work-at-home situations that offer the same benefits (monetarily and otherwise) of working outside the home, like when you have a steady job with one employer who lets you work from home instead of at the office. But for those of us who freelance and whose work is sporadic and piecemeal, working at home can be a drag. For one, it can bring on depression. And here’s why:

1) Who’s the boss? Most people would think not having a traditional boss would be a good thing, right? But when you freelance for a number of different companies, you are at the mercy of their very different rules and requirements, and although you run your own company per se, the clients are the ones who direct your work. Many times too, projects can overlap and deadlines can conflict, meaning you have to take on two or more jobs at once, working crazy-long hours to get everything done, and oftentimes the work suffers. If that happens, you run the chance of not getting called on for more work.

2) Whose line is it anyway? Because of the risk of being contacted by an employer at any time via e-mail or by phone, most workers would say there’s a fine line between work and home these days. But with freelancing, there’s no line at all. At the end of the day, people who work in a physical space, be it an office, a factory, or a library, are able to walk away from work, get in their cars or hop on the bus or train, and go home. They may take their work with them via a laptop or running through work scenarios in their heads, but there’s a clear line of demarcation between work and home. Freelancers don’t have that luxury. They literally live with their work. They can work at 2 p.m. or 2 a.m. They work weekends, weekdays, and holidays even. They work when the work is there or, as stated at the end of point number one above, they may not be working at all.

3) Show me the money! Unless you’re JK Rowling or someone equally fortunate and talented to have made it big while doing something without a regular paycheck, the money from freelancing or contract work is not as lucrative as working for an employer. Polls have shown that freelancers doing the same type of work and who have the same education as those in full-time jobs are paid woefully less for the same output. A small percentage can make more, but I guarantee you they are working many more hours than the guy in the office. And yes, you can pay for your own health care and it is a tax deduction, but take it from someone who has had health care plans through an employer and plans not through an employer, without a workplace plan the premiums are higher, the benefits are lower, and you still have to earn enough to pay for those premiums. It’s not a win-win situation at all.

4) I’m so lonesome, I could cry. Sitting in a room for hours on end and staring at a screen, a canvas, or whatever work tool you use can be isolating, to say the least. Whether you like ’em or not, people need other people. We’re social animals. So’s my dog, of course, but I can only have a one-sided conversation with him. We crave human interaction, even those superficial conversations while standing by the watercooler chatting about last night’s episode of 60 Minutes.  (Do offices even have watercoolers anymore or have those been replaced by water bottles? Well, at least 60 Minutes is still around.)

5) Risky business. Even well-established companies shut down entire plants and office complexes at times (now more often than ever), so there’s not a soul who isn’t at risk of losing his or her job at any time these days. Long gone are the companies that hire workers straight out of school or the service, employ them for their entire working lives, and send them off into retirement with a nice, fat pension.Though they’re few and far between, there still are some employers like that. Freelancers, however, can’t count on steady work, let alone steady paychecks, ever. And there’s no pension, not even a 401(k), to fall back on one day. Sure, you can squirrel away a few thousand a year into an IRA, but there are limits to how much you can contribute and it’s all after-tax, not pretax money.

6) Happiness is a warm gun. The hot-and-cold of freelancing is extremely difficult to handle especially if you’re a lukewarm person. I like things I can count on. I’ve been married for 30 years and have had some of the same friends for decades. I hold on to my cars (the one I drive turned 14 last month), and I eat the same breakfast daily. I’m a very consistent person, so having a job without a consistent workflow is really difficult to bear. I am trying to supplement my freelance career with a “regular” job outside the home just so I have something to count on on a weekly basis, but finding even part-time work outside the home is difficult if you don’t have a steady employer to vouch for you. References are really hard to come by, too. Yes, you can use as a reference the client for whom you did a bang-up job on a recent project, but how are you going to look to that client if you mention seeking outside work? He or she may think you’re no longer interested in the occasional project and not call on you again, whether you got the regular job or not. He or she may think your time will be limited now, little does he know that you were juggling gigs while doing work for him too.

There are ways to get around the feelings of isolation (take your work to Starbucks, take a walk, go to the park, meet up with friends, join a group with other freelancers) and there are times the money is good for the work done, but there’s no getting around the roller-coaster ride of workflow that freelancers have, which in turn can affect one’s mood.

I try to look at the positives of working from home (being “there” for my kids, being in a comfortable place, not having to fight traffic in a big city–that one’s huge in my mind, and not having to dress up or even shower–OK, that one can be a big negative, actually). And I do realize that there’s good and bad with both scenarios and, truth be told, I’d rather work at home. But there’s no getting around the fact that there are negatives. Now if only I had a coworker to discuss them with.