Aaron Crowe

June 8, 2010, marks two years since I was laid off, and I’m still without a full-time job. It was an anniversary I hoped to avoid, but I keep plugging along with part-time work to help keep a roof over our heads.

Soon after being laid off, I started this blog as Tales of an Unemployed Dad to detail the job hunt while raising a child while my wife returned to work full-time. She still works full-time and we still have health benefits, and our daughter is now 5.

It has been a long two years, probably the most stressful of my life. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned during those two years:

1. After being a freelance journalist for the past two years and enjoying all of the freedom that comes with it, I still think I’d prefer working at a regular day job with set hours and steady income. I enjoy the work I do, but having my income being determined on whether I have a good day and find stories and have sources get back to me makes a nervous start, and end, to every day.
2. I’ve got a new appreciation for the underemployed. I didn’t even know what the term meant until 2008, but now feel like an expert on it. Underemployment describes people who seek full-time work, but can’t find it and must take many part-time jobs to make up the difference. They often work without the benefits, such as health insurance and vacation days, that full-time workers get.
3. Looking for work is a full-time job by itself. I’ve spent hours each day looking for jobs, talking with people, preparing for job interviews and doing other such tasks, all while working 20-30 hours a week and trying to keep a 5-year-old out of trouble.
4. I enjoy writing. This may be the best benefit of the layoff. I was an assistant metro editor at the Contra Costa Times, a daily newspaper in the Bay Area, and had also worked there as a copy editor for years. It had been years since I worked as a reporter, and while I continue doing some editing and working with reporters on story assignments on a freelance basis, I quickly found that it was great to be back writing again.
5. Every day is exciting, but still a struggle. I look forward to the work I do, but the tentativeness of it makes every day stressful. I realize that’s a part of life and that it occurs even with a full-time job, but as I said from the top here, I need some steadiness to keep me sane. I don’t expect any job, whether part-time freelance work or a career at one newspaper, to last a lifetime, but I’d like to find something that I know will be there for me to do a year from now. Maybe that’s a goal I’ll never achieve in this economy, but it’s something I keep looking for.

That’s enough for now. I could probably write for days about what I’ve learned these past two years, and I’ll continue to blog about it, but those are the highlights.

Comment and let me know what you’ve learned from being laid off for a long time. After all, almost half of the unemployed have been without a job for six months or longer, so the numbers of the long-term unemployed are only going to grow.