Lisa (not her real name) had been crying the day that we talked.
“This job thing is just wearing me down,” she explained. “People don’t know how awful it is not to have a job. People (who have jobs) never think it could happen to them. People think they are smarter, they’ll know someone, they would never get caught up in this.”
Lisa and I exchanged e-mails for a couple weeks over this dilemma. She thought I should write about joblessness. She had a lot to say.
“No matter how high the unemployment is, if you don’t have a job, people still think there’s something wrong with you. … I have never been so depressed in all my life. I’ve got a college degree, and I can’t get a job at J.C. Penney.”
She said she knew people who have gotten so discouraged they just stopped looking for work. “I apply for 10-15 jobs a week,” she said. “I do everything I’m supposed to do, like send thank-you cards, etc., and then I see the job in the paper again. It’s incredibly frustrating. If you’re a woman and you don’t have money, you feel even more powerless, like you’re living at someone else’s mercy. Men? Their families are depending on them.”