Just because people seem to be invoking the great recession a lot lately, and I keep starting to tell this story in comments on social media but it gets too long or too personal, here’s my little slice of how I got fucked by the recession in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s.
In 2007, I had been working in retail for a bit, and was getting very sick of shit pay and shittier managers. I responded to a Craigslist posting for a job at a small camera equipment rental place, and despite being an awkward 23 year old, I got the job. I ended up managing most of the day to day operations, fulfilling orders and cleaning gear and emailing customers and designing systems to keep track of everything. I worked alone most of the time, which was a little lonely but mostly great – after working in retail and having no control over when I took breaks, what I wore, or what music I listened to, this job was the best fucking thing. I would have stayed there forever, and honestly planned to. At that point in my life, it was the only time I’d really felt competent and useful, like someone other people could rely on. After all the bullshit of changing high schools and leaving college and feeling like a huge failure, this was what I needed. Even now, I credit this job with helping me understand that I could be self sufficient and productive even if I got super burned out being around people all day. It’s part of why I’m a dog walker now – while I can do the customer service thing, it totally exhausts me, and I end up enjoying the rest of my life less, because work takes up so much of my energy.
Anyway, the timing was shit. The recession hit in 2008-2009, orders dried up, I worked fewer and fewer hours, and even though the writing had been on the wall for months, I was blindsided when I got laid off at the beginning of 2010. I had no idea what else I could even do – I’d put all my eggs in this one basket, and it was such a unique situation. Who else was going to hire a 25 year old with no college degree?
The answer, unfortunately, was absolutely no one. I applied to at least 3 jobs every week for almost a year and half and got maybe 2 interviews the entire time. In the meantime, I went back to school for veterinary technology, which was a whole ordeal unto itself – interesting and rewarding, but a ton of work and a miserable (unpaid) externship, followed by a string of stressful, low paying vet tech jobs. It wasn’t all bad – I have a pretty marketable skill set now, and a bunch of experience, and I got a degree and certification out of it. But I haven’t been a tech in several years, because the industry just has so many systemic issues. The pay is crap, especially for how much skill and experience and education everyone wants; if you’re doing this, you’re probably a compassionate and empathetic person, and you WILL get burned out, and there’s basically no support for when that happens; and management is either practice owners that have no idea how to run a business OR people that went to business school and have no idea how to run a vet practice. So now I walk dogs, which I enjoy, and which pays about the same as being a tech, which is fucked up. But I’m also bored and restless and I wish I could use my degree and training for something without it sucking the life out of me. Open to suggestions.
ANYWAY, I digress. After I got laid off, Stace and I moved up to Gloucester, ostensibly so I could be closer to school, but also so I could run the fuck away from some awkward social situations that seemed so world-endingly terrible that they could never be fixed. It turned out that time and distance and not being 25 fixed most of it.*
This turned into a very different thing than I was expecting, but I guess that’s okay. I’ve been somewhere on the in a funk/depressed spectrum for months, and it seems like the way out of that for me is usually writing.
*I wrote a song about this period of time while it was happening that’s held up relatively well, maybe I’ll dig it out again