Aguascalientes, Peru.

Reflections on 6 Months of Deliberate Unemployment

Tamara S.
Tamara S.
Aug 27, 2017 · 6 min read

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last 6 months, it’s that people get very uncomfortable when I say I’m not employed.

What? You mean you’re looking, right? You’ve signed up with a temp agency? You’re giving out your resume at every networking event and job fair you’re obviously attending? I’m sure so-and-so down the road is hiring, why don’t you go there and ask? I know someone who needs a part-time IT specialist, maybe you should do some consulting… and on, and on.

I guess it’s some interesting societal conditioning suddenly kicking in which associates unemployment with everything from bread lines to EI; from being broke to brokenness. So much of our social identity is tied up with what we do for a living that when you tell people you’re temporarily living without the doing, you end up on the receiving end of an expression that can’t make up its mind between pitying and jealous. You get deluges of advice, awkward silences, semi-wistful sighs of “oh, I wish”. It’s been interesting.

It’s been weird for me too, honestly. Although I’ve spent the last 5 years of my life more-or-less specializing, I’m a generalist at heart. I like many things, and I’m familiar with many aspects of my field (and fluent in a few). So the vague answer which comes out when people ask me what I did before being jobless is brief and unsatisfying for both parties: “I work in IT”. And while I’m taking steps towards making that answer more specific again, I don’t have much I’m able to share publicly here, due to the nature of the position(s) I’m applying for.

In that case, what the heck have I spent the last 6 months doing?

Well, the first month was spent doing a whole lot of nothing. I haven’t had this kind of truly open free time as an adult — I went straight from high school into 5 years of university, with full-time jobs every summer, then ~5 years of full-time work. Sure, a few small productive things got done, but for the most part, it was spent recovering from a burnout in progress at the time I left my job, and then dealing with the aftermath of that burnout. My apartment was a mess, and my sleep quality had been progressively deteriorating since the middle of last year. I also spent a large chunk of my awake hours getting organized to be able to “work” from Peru for 5 weeks, then go on a long hike up to Macchu Picchu afterwards. I left for this trip at the end of the first 8 weeks of no-job.

In Peru, I joined up with Hacker Paradise, a digital nomad organization with a rotating trip schedule. It was my first time being part of something like this while being productive overseas (I’d previously spent 8 months in New Zealand working remotely, but that was completely independent). Being around other intensely focused people helped me regain my own focus, and I was able to get a lot of research done into my chosen career path, as well as set personal goals again and start working towards them. The culture shift of speaking/learning another language also made my brain work hard again at something it enjoyed and could get better at, which was a good feeling. I then spent some time more-or-less off the grid for ~10 days while I hiked (we did have basic wi-fi at our lodges, but I limited my use), and relaxed for a few days in Iquitos before coming back in mid-May feeling much more refreshed and ready to work towards new things.

Made it!

May through August, my focus was on steady progress towards the future. To this end, I redid my resume and cover letter templates, and started an overhaul of my LinkedIn profile (still in progress). I got my professional pictures retaken, attended a career orientation for a field closely related to the one I want, and obsessively checked my job application status online (ok, maybe that’s not as forward-moving as I’d like…). I also enrolled in a post-grad certificate with Ryerson University for CompSec and Digital Forensics, and completed the first course (Network Security). The industry I want to get into uses very specialized tools and processes, and I had no prior knowledge of those, so this seemed like a good idea at the time. We’ll see how it pans out. Almost everything I try these days is an experiment.

On the personal side, I cleared out two years’ worth of emails, finished furnishing my apartment (although I still haven’t fully unpacked from my move last year… working on it), tied up a lot of loose ‘to-do’ list items which had been sitting for a while, and reworked my 2017 bucket/goals/dreams list. Continuing with the experiments, I signed on with a nutrition accountability service and a Spanish class, took two pottery classes, tried salsa (dancing), tried a different gym for cardio, tried a writing course. I started a 100-day project where I attempt to get up at/around 8am (you can follow this on my Instagram). I visited my family and friends in my hometown, and took some other small trips as well. If I can’t travel now, when can I?

Pottery in progress from my last class

It’s been true of unemployment that not everything I spend time on is productive; sometimes I stare at my phone and play games for way too long. I take long walks to get a coffee without worrying about how long it’s taking. I go to the gym outside of peak hours. I sit at the bar in the middle of the day and draw out a pint while reading. I’m definitely in an incredibly privileged position where I can be unemployed deliberately for 6 months and still live the lifestyle I want, without putting in full-time hours on a job search. It’s been both fantastic and humbling.

At the time of writing, I’m planning several upcoming trips. One is small, but the other… I’ve finally, finally been able to put a cross-country train trip together. I’ve been working with a travel coordinator since July but the dates weren’t working. This past week, we finalized everything. It’s a trip I’ve always wanted to do, but would have had some previous issues with, since it’s at least 10 days with unreliable internet. So I’ll be gone for the first half of October, travelling by train from Halifax to Vancouver. I’m incredibly excited, and I’m thinking of good ways to document this trip, so if you have any ideas, please let me know!

My goal is to be employed by my next birthday — that’s the end of March next year. Ideally sooner, but we’re heading into a “dead period” for hiring, especially in the organization I’ve got my eye on, which makes it unlikely I’ll get any offers between November-January. I never anticipated that I’d be unemployed for this long, but now that I’m in it, it feels like it goes by faster every day. One day I’ll look back on this period of my life and thank myself for taking the time to just live for a while, without anything else full-time. So I’m making it as rich in experiences as I possibly can.

A lot has happened in the last half-year, and there’s more still to come. I haven’t yet found a good way to summarize all of this up when I get one of those awkward silences. Maybe the answer is in the cheesy one-liner: “I’m currently relaxing full-time”. Or maybe it’s just a smile at the last 6 months’ worth of memories.

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P.S. Stay tuned for my next post — I’ll be following up with an introduction to the area of IT I’m focusing on.

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