Being Unemployed Four Times by my Mid Twenties: A Retrospective
2018 was an interesting year for me. In the spring, I graduated college with two degrees and numerous honors. In the fall, I found myself unemployed, living in a questionable neighborhood in a new city, and feeling more unsure about my future than I ever had previously.
Initially I had planned on spending that fall in Sweden pursuing a research project on the experiences of Swedish Muslims for which I had received grant funding. Unfortunately, due to some of my own negligence, the funding fell through and after a few unsuccessful months of employment applications, I found myself working at a cafe.
Certainly there is no such thing as unskilled labor and service workers in our society truly deserve both more respect and compensation than they receive, but after spending four years pouring my energy and passion into study and self-cultivation, working a low-paying job totally disconnected from all that works was psychologically very hard on me.
A few months later, right around Christmas time, one of my roommates, Allison, decided to end her life. While this was certainly not the first time I had been witness to death and loss, the closeness and intensity of the tragedy was not something I’d experienced previously.
Needless to say, life wasn’t panning out at all how I anticipated as a starry-eyed 21-year-old.
In 2019, I moved to Madison for a change of scenery and to hopefully be closer to many friends. Once again, I found myself unemployed, this time for a sizable chunk of time. I really didn’t want to return to service work, but I was no longer a fresh college grad and didn’t yet have real work experience on my resume, so things were not panning out. In the end, I wound up as a barista yet again.
Then covid hit. And for the third time in my early adulthood, I found myself without a job and without direction. Eventually, in the fall of 2020, I took a job nannying for a family with three kids in online school. This proved to be the hardest job I’d had, looking after the wellbeing of three children (six, nine, and twelve at the time) in the midst of a very intense historical moment while also facilitating learning and personal growth. Needless to say, it was also very personally rewarding being able to have such a direct, tangible impact.
In the midst of all of these twists and turns in life, I’d continued pursuing my passions with what energy I had left. I read philosophy texts during my lunch breaks when I was a barista, I organized online reading groups with new friends with similar interests during the pandemic, I put together an online Islamic studies publication with some peers, and I tried to reach out and make connections with professors and scholars that inspired me.
In late 2021, after my FOURTH stint of unemployment, I began working for the Cobb Institute, and subsequently the Center for Process Studies. Suddenly, I found myself in the midst of an incredible community of academics and activists with whom I share common values and visions. Through my work these past few years, I’ve been able to help put on a number of incredible academic events and connect with people I had looked up to for years, now as colleagues. I could not be more grateful for the job I have, where I get to use the skills I’ve developed to do things I’m truly passionate about, and which make a real difference in the world, even in small ways.
However, I have also been overextended these past few years. Managing content for fourteen social media profiles all on my own, building websites from the ground up, creating a new brand identity for our organization… all more or less entirely on my own initiative. To say I’m exhausted by all the screen time and notifications is an understatement.
Despite my deep gratitude and joy for my work, I could use some help. And help requires resources. So, if my own work has ever touched you in meaningful ways or you would just like to be a part of accessible philosophical and interreligious education for the future — voilà!
Please consider making a contribution to the Marketing and Communications department at the Center for Process Studies here to ease my load and empower our continued work in these veins!
