Fifteen years ago, I stood alone outside a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, staring at a second-floor window as my heart beat hard in my chest. It was my first AA meeting, and I knew that once I walked through those doors, things would never be the same. Once I said I was an alcoholic, I could never un-say it. I might drink again or I might not (though at the time, I found that hard to imagine), but whatever I did going forward, the context would have changed.
This scene came back to me earlier this month when my reflections on long-term unemployment began flying around the Internet, shared by friends on Facebook and Twitter, and then by friends of friends. In Salon, the piece carried the headline “Even Harvard Couldn’t Protect Me,” but in my mind I retitled it “The Essay Wherein I Out Myself as Being Unemployed.” Since my last job ended, I’d grown accustomed to describing myself as a freelancer, which was true, but just not the whole truth. While I was indeed doing writing for hire, including some very cool projects — a speech for a Harvard dean, essays for Salon — the fact is these assignments didn’t come close to covering my expenses.
Still, no one challenged me. It was easy enough to pass. So why did I decide to drop the mask — and in such a public way?
You could say it’s because I’m a writer and this is what writers do, but I don’t think that’s really it. I am not, by nature or by nurture, an avid self-discloser. I grew up in the conservative Midwest, in a world where appearances matter and where, as the old saying goes, you don’t air your dirty laundry in public. A few years back, when a friend asked what religion I’d grown up with, I quipped, “Our religion was good manners.” (The real answer: Congregationalist mixed with some Methodism, thanks to the appealing activities of a neighborhood Methodist youth group.)
But if going public with unemployment didn’t come naturally, it also struck me as the right thing to do, what AA and other 12-step acolytes describe as “the next right action.” Indeed, it was in AA that I first learned to talk openly about my life — about things that had hurt me, things for which I felt shame. It was in AA that I first learned the healing power of simply telling my story. (In fact, some research suggests that the primary reason for AA’s success may be its capacity to foster social bonds through shared experience.)
And yet, enlivening as such exchanges are, they still run sharply counter to mainstream American culture. We often seem almost phobic about acknowledging the truth of how things are, at least when they’re anything short of A+ picture perfect. In a recent radio interview about his new memoir, “Life Itself,” film critic Roger Ebert talked about refusing to conceal the disfiguring results of a cancer that cost him his lower jaw. “I was warned not to be photographed looking like this,” he said. “But this is what I look like, and there’s nothing I can do about it. We spend too much time as a society denying illness. It’s a fact of life.” The inspiration drawn by listeners from Ebert’s example came through in their admiring letters: “Thanks for having the courage to still be in the public eye and inspire the rest of us to keep living life,” wrote one. “I’m glad to be in a world with [him] in it,” wrote another.
There’s a lesson here. Our most meaningful connections with other people are often rooted in shared pain and vulnerabilities. When I think of the human stories that have touched me most deeply, they almost always reflect a defiant disregard of appearances and convention. I think of feminist powerhouse Katha Pollitt’s New Yorker piece on cyber-stalking an ex-lover, a fearless foray into the psychic terrain of passion gone awry, and one that helped me enormously in making peace with certain episodes in my own romantic past. And I think of the late Caroline Knapp’s best-selling “Drinking: A Love Story,” the potent and beautifully wrought memoir that introduced me to AA, changing my life profoundly and forever as it did those of countless others.
In my admittedly unscientific study, I’ve found that the pain of the Great Recession (as so much else) abates some when it’s shared. In this era of lost homes, lost jobs and lost hopes, forging human connections can be transformative. By contrast, when we conceal the reality of our lives — try to “pass” as happier, more secure, or more successful than we are — we feed into a culture of private suffering and isolation, a lonely and disheartening place where failure equates with shame. This is what Buddhists call the “the second arrow,” the pain of self-judgment compounding the pain of actual experience.
Of course, this isn’t to say we should disclose our secrets with indiscriminate abandon. The decision about how and when to open up is a deeply personal one. By now, we’re all aware (or should be) that the Internet is forever, and in my own case, I thought long and hard before writing about unemployment. I doubt if I’d have opted to speak so publicly at an earlier stage in life, before paying my professional dues and finding a community of friends that loves me no matter what.
That being said, when we’re willing to take our place among the ordinary, flawed, anxious and wondrous inhabitants of planet Earth, we may find ourselves awakening to new possibilities. Our vulnerabilities can become our strengths — and not in the way of the saccharine cliché of making lemons out of lemonade but rather in a way that calls on all of our ingenuity, strength and courage. Telling our stories can be both a creative and political act.
As I started to think about writing this essay, I wasn’t sure how to begin. While my AA experience leapt to mind, I didn’t know if I was ready to out myself yet again. Clearly, it was time to do a little more “research.” (That’s what we writers call Net surfing intended to postpone writing.) I did a Google search for “AA” and “stories,” and was stunned to stumble on Roger Ebert recounting his own AA journey. Once I got over my initial surprise — while I’d just heard Ebert talk about cancer, I’d known nothing of his AA past — I could see how it was all of a piece, this facing up to what is. And I thought about how one thing leads to another and how some truths are worth the risk.
Earlier this year, I cleared out a storage locker jammed with the accumulated overflow of almost two adult decades — along with some boxes of college books tossed in for good measure. This was actually my second storage locker, the successor to the Manhattan mini-storage unit that I acquired to insert some breathing space in the Upper West Side one-bedroom I rented shortly after law school. It was intended as a temporary measure, a momentary regrouping. But eight years later, when I finally packed up, the unit was still mine.
This past April, another full decade later, I watched with anxiety as movers unloaded seemingly endless stacks of boxes to the basement of my new home in Northampton, Mass. Would my books have gathered mold? Would my clothing be moth-infested? Would my sturdy law school bicycle even be functional?
And in fact, there were some disheartening moments — a silk dress passed down from my grandmother that had simply disintegrated — but the main reaction as I unpacked: What a bunch of junk. Here’s some of what I found: a desktop computer circa 1989, with its companion dot-matrix printer. A non-working halogen floor lamp. Cartons of music cassette tapes from bands I’d forgotten existed. Boxes of law school textbooks. (And yes, some of them were dusty with mold, but really, who cared?) The list goes on. And on.
It got me thinking about why I’d stashed all this stuff in the first place — and I had plenty of time to think as I hauled mountains of papers and ancient electronics to the town dump. Over the decades, I’d paid well over $10,000 — $10,000! — to stockpile these motley items, an amount far exceeding their value. I couldn’t stop imagining other uses for this vanished cash. How had I let this happen? To be sure, I was far from alone in this seeming lunacy. There are 51,000 storage facilities in the United States, more than seven times the number of Starbucks, and one in 10 American households now rents a storage unit, according to a 2009 New York Times Magazine report. But far from reassuring me, this just made the phenomenon seem stranger.
I remember shockingly little of what I learned in law school, but one article from my first-year property class has stayed with me over the years, in particular a quirky yet oddly profound observation that we’d be more distressed to return home and find our living room sofa gone than to learn that the value of our home had dropped by a few percentage points. This is because certain possessions are “self-constitutive.” They are intimately bound up with our sense of who we are. “A person cannot be fully a person without a sense of continuity of self over time,” wrote University of Michigan law professor Margaret Jane Radin in her seminal article “Property and Personhood.” “In order to lead a normal life, there must be some continuity in relating to ‘things’.”
If a fulfilling life requires roots as well as wings, my own life has veered decidedly toward the latter. My family of origin has scattered from London to L.A., and we have few remaining ties to the Midwestern city of my childhood. As an adult, I’ve lived in Washington, D.C., Manhattan, Mississippi (the Delta and Jackson), Nashville, Cambridge, Mass. (twice), and western Massachusetts (both the Berkshires and the Pioneer Valley). Single, no kids, I’ve traveled light. (At least, if you don’t count the storage.)
Perhaps holding close to my belongings has been a compensation of sorts, a way of making up for the absence of other enduring ties. Along with utility bills from the 1980s, a broken coffee maker, and a set of wicker window shades, my storage unit also sheltered items rich with personal meaning. The copy-edited manuscript of my first novel. A collection of rare books about the Deep South dating from my years as a vagabond newspaper reporter. The purple and pink neon wall clock bestowed by a once devoted boyfriend.
These things mattered, and I was glad to have them. At the same time, they also evoked a certain uneasiness, an anxious, unsettled sort of feeling that I struggled to make sense of. Buddhist teachings tell us that attachment is the source of all suffering. Everything we love and cherish will eventually be lost; that’s just the way things are. This is why we’re urged to ground our happiness in things beyond change and why Buddhists vow to take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (teachings) and the Sangha (community) — the so-called Triple Jewel.
The concept of refuge struck a chord with me. In my own life, I’ve tended to invest deeply in objects collected and carried with me from place to place over the decades. The impulse is understandable, natural even. As Radin observes, we count on a certain external stability — for example, the ongoing presence of that aforementioned living room sofa. And yet more and more, for many of us, life is upsetting these expectations, making it difficult if not impossible to keep hold of what we have.
We live in an era of lost homes and lost jobs, of vertiginous stock market swings and careening retirement plans. The ambient surround of loss and fear can make us acutely sensitive to the costs of letting go — so much so that we may lose sight of the costs of holding on. In an era where family homes were paid off and passed on through generations, a sense of connection to place and possessions may well have tended to enhance our collective well-being. But in this time of unpredictable turbo-charged change, such attachments often come at tremendous cost both in dollars and in human pain.
In such uncertain times, it seems wise to think carefully about where we choose to seek refuge, about how we plan to meet our deepest needs for continuity and meaning. We might start with a question that Radin suggests in her book “Reinterpreting Property”: What are the connections that will enable us to flourish? We can do our best to safeguard the things we value while also recognizing we will suffer less if we can look for enduring sources of happiness.
As the ideas for this essay started to come together, I wanted to reacquaint myself with the Radin piece that had made such a strong impression on me more than two decades before. This was precisely the sort of need I’d anticipated in saving my law school files, and even as I reflected on the merits of letting go, I congratulated my foresight. I even knew just where the box was in the jumble that now filled my basement. But when I filed through its contents, Radin’s article was nowhere to be found. To be sure, I had plenty else from that long-ago property class — lecture notes, study outlines, even the syllabus. The only thing I couldn’t find was the one thing I needed.
It finally occurred to me that Radin was a real person with a real email address, and that this information would be readily available on the University of Michigan Law School’s website. She got back to me within an hour, identifying the book in which the essay appeared. For less than 10 bucks, it was on my Kindle, then a quick search, and there it was: the sofa reference I’d been seeking.
I couldn’t help noting that an email had accomplished what more than $10,000 in storage had not.
Then I went back to loading my car for another trip to the dump.
“We live in a society where it’s hard to maintain self-respect if you don’t have a job,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, philosopher at Princeton, said in a recent radio interview, and I can certainly identify. All of my life I’ve been an achievement junkie. I have two Harvard degrees, practiced law at elite Manhattan firms, and wrote and published two novels, among other things. But of all my accomplishments, by far the most impressive is absent from my résumé: It’s my more than two-year stint of job searching and unemployment.
If you’ve been unemployed you already know this, but if you haven’t, here’s a news flash: Coping with prolonged joblessness is hugely demanding. It requires deep reservoirs of fortitude, faith, patience, courage and self-control, traditional virtues generally accorded high regard in our nation’s pantheon of values. Of course, we’re a country that values hard work, and that’s as it should be. But don’t our values also dictate respect for the efforts of the struggling unemployed?
Two years of job hunting has required infinitely more of me than any of my lauded past achievements. And I, of course, am among the relatively fortunate, with a cushion of savings and a supportive group of friends. And here is what I think: If the experience is still this hard for me, how much harder must it be for the millions who lack these things?
There is a distinct Groundhog Day quality to days spent looking for work: Write letters. Prepare résumés. Search job boards. Make phone calls and brainstorm over coffee. Sleep. Get up. Repeat. After sending off my materials, I often hear nothing back. I’ve long since lost count of the number of jobs I’ve applied for.
As an “older worker” — When did that happen? — I try to ignore a drumbeat of statistics telling me I face an uphill battle. It’s hard not to feel worn down, to succumb to “learned helplessness,” our innate tendency to give up when our efforts fail to yield results. Still, like millions of others, day by day I keep going.
My exertions often seem strangely invisible, not only to my family and friends but increasingly to me — an experience that turns out to be widely shared in job-loss land. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. As Atlantic journalist Don Peck recounts in “Pinched,” his sobering account of the changes wrought by the Great Recession, studies show “a growing isolation, a warping of family dynamics, and a slow separation from mainstream society” among the long-term unemployed. Strikingly, no other circumstance triggers a larger decline in well-being and mental health than involuntary joblessness. Only the death of a spouse compares.
Such findings are all the more disturbing given that unemployment is a fact of life for a fast-growing segment of the American population, as reflected in last month’s 0 percent net job growth. As has been widely noted, this is some 150,000 shy of the number needed simply to keep up with the growing population. By the middle of last year, 55 percent of American workers — that’s a majority of the workforce, in case you missed it — had either lost a job, had their hours cut, been forced to go part-time, or been hit with a cut in pay. At the start of this year, the average unemployment duration of more than nine months was longer than it’s been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the figure in 1948, according to Peck.
And yet, daunting as these numbers may be, they only hint at the human suffering that they reflect. In his 2010 book “The Honor Code,” Appiah places honor at the heart of what it takes to lead a successful life, noting that throughout history, societies have adopted guidelines for how people “can gain the right to respect, how they can lose it, and how having and losing honor changes the way they should be treated.” The result: “[P]eople in an honor world automatically regard those who meet its codes with respect and those who breach them with contempt.”
This stark dichotomy — between respect and contempt — got me to thinking. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to see that when there are six job seekers for every job, it’s simply not possible for everyone to find work. And in fact, as others have noted, the reality is even tougher on the unemployed than these numbers suggest. For one, they (we) are competing for positions not only with other unemployed workers but also with applicants already in the workforce who are looking to move on. They (we) are also contending with subtle — and not so subtle — biases against the unemployed, including the proliferation of “unemployed need not apply” caveats on job ads for positions ranging from electrical engineers to restaurant managers. Thanks to my legal background, this shocked me less than it did some of my friends. I knew that current laws don’t prohibit discrimination against the jobless.
So how is it that so many have come to disdain the unemployed? To equate unemployment with failure and shiftlessness? If the barometer of popular culture is any indication, this wasn’t always so. In the 1962 film classic “A Touch of Mink,” plucky all-American Cathy Timberlake (aka Doris Day) is on the way to collect her unemployment check, when a chauffeured limousine splashes her with mud. It’s Cathy Timberlake — not the feckless industry titan played by Cary Grant — who represents the traditional American values that in the end carry the day. Firmly planted at the dark pole of the film’s moral compass is the creepy unemployment office bureaucrat who alternately taunts Timberlake for taking government money and hits on her. The film has plenty of disdain for the titan and the bureaucrat and plenty of sympathy for Timberlake.
Fifty years later, the world feels grimly different. Contempt and shame are becoming inseparable from the fact of unemployment. Fueling such attitudes are multiple strands in American culture — not only the Protestant ethic pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy so widespread among conservatives but also the if-you-believe-it-you-can-have-it philosophy espoused by self-help gurus and skewered by cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich in “Bright-Sided,” an impassioned attack on our nation’s dysfunctional love affair with positive thinking.
Not everyone will agree that the nation’s unemployed are entitled to be treated with respect. To skeptics, I have this to say: Consider your self-interest. Things are likely to get worse before they get better for the U.S. economy. More jobs will be lost; your turn may be next. And if not you, then someone you care about: your child. Your parent. Your friend. Honoring the unemployed will enhance our collective well-being. An encouraging word, a phone call: Small things make a difference. Try making these connections. Then watch the ripple effect.
(Credit: wrangler via Shutterstock) 
