I’ve been unemployed since when I was laid off from a warehouse job where, despite being promised full time work with benefits, I was basically treated as a temp, working only when things where really busy, then staying home sometimes for weeks at a time. With 15 months of unemployment exhausted, I’ve been living off of savings for the last few months but it’s starting to run low. I was just turned down last week for the only job I’ve been able to get an interview for in the whole time I’ve been unemployed. I have an associate transfer degree and as much as I would like to go back to school, watching my friends graduate with tons of debt and only being able to find crappy jobs that don’t even help them make their minimum payments puts me off that idea. On the other hand, I hear the echoes of “you’ll never get a good job unless you go to college” in my head and even though I can plainly see that’s bullshit, I’m afraid I’m screwing myself over for the rest of my life just to avoid some debt. I constantly hear about how my generation is never going to fully recover from this recession so I usually feel pretty hopeless despite my best attempts to resist it. I have depression and anxiety issues that are going untreated (no health insurance, obviously) and only getting worse because I have a hard time seeing how my life will ever get better. I’m grateful for the coming healthcare reforms but that’s still a couple of years away and I’m not sure how I’m going to make it in the meantime. People my age get labeled as a bunch of lazy, selfish brats who expect six-figure jobs to fall into their laps, but I just want a job that lets me live on my own and pay my bills, and to be able to go to a doctor when I need to without bankrupting myself.

I’m a teacher by trade. Specifically, since this country really doesn’t treat what I do as teaching, I should be specific: a college teacher. An adjunctposition, no less.

That’s what my parents had when they were younger than I am now, so I don’t think that’s asking too much

I have been unemployed now for over seven months. I expect to remain so at least through December, and, at least as far as teaching goes, through to next fall.

I sent an application off to a temp agency in hopes of getting some money coming in, but I have yet to hear back from them

I think my story is typical in many ways. I have worked lots of different kinds of jobs in my life. A custodian (at a hospital as a teenager, at a juvy hall as an adult), at a library, book stores, restaurants, offices, a warehouse, as a patient sitter, a tutor, etc. I am a vet too. I even worked for the DOL as an auditor of EEOPs, one of my favorite jobs. But I am a teacher by nature and training. And since becoming a teacher, it has become almost impossible for me to get other kinds of jobs. They won’t have me. They are right to be suspicious: I won’t stay if I get a better job, and, yes, I will likely, quietly agitate for unionizing (that FedEx job lasted, like, two days; I casually mentioned their lobbying congress for an airline exemption to unionizing and the pay mark down over the last five or so years; oops).