Unemployment Roller Coaster

If life is an amusement park, then losing your job is a roller coaster.  It's not a ferris wheel or a free fall only.  It is the most intense and thrilling ride at the amusement park.  There are lows and highs and lots of turns. You can slowly climb up a big hill then, without warning, the bottom will fall out and you will dive sharply to the lowest of lows. 

The outplacement folks told us there was a wide range of emotions we would feel in the process of becoming unemployed and finding a new job.  They gave us a chart of the progression of emotions and I was pleased to discover that I was nearly through it all and the next step, I guessed, was pure bliss.  Not so.  I've been through all of the emotions at least twice in the last three months; going round and round, up and down and never getting to bliss.  Will this ride ever end?

I'm not normally an emotional person.  However, when you're looking for a job you have to expose your soft, pink underbelly to the world and that vulnerability opens you up to anxiety with potential rejection and pain.  It's like I got a free ticket on the main attraction ride and I want everyone to think I'm composed and confident, but inside I'm just hoping I don't puke and the little kids look more frightened than me!

There is a difference in this job search which distinguishes it from other job searches.  Being laid off feels like I've been dumped out on the street on my tail.  I feel rejected, unwanted and perhaps a little broken.  I am not in the job market because I choose to be and so I am lacking the casual attitude that new-opportunity-seekers enjoy.  I'm not saying I'm desperate, but it's more intense when you have nothing to fall back on if you aren't selected.  I'm carrying some heavy luggage and I'm not even sure in which direction I would like to go.

Recently, I found myself going for another turn on the roller coaster when I realized how to make it stop.  I must lay down all of my past experiences and emotions and search my soul for one thing - hope.  It was so obvious, yet I ignored the one emotion that would dissolve all doubt and worry.  I have lived the scripture verse, "we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope" (Romans 5:3-4).

You must find hope, too, even if it is only a burning ember about to be extinguished.  If we have but a glimmer of hope, we will survive.  Before we know it, that ember of hope will ignite into ambition and there will be no limit to what we can accomplish.  We will pick ourselves up off the street, dust off and head in ANY direction.

Let's get off this ride, find some cotton candy and enjoy the rest of the amusement park.

"Hope itself is like a star, not to be seen in the prosperity of the sun, but only at night amid darkness."
- Charles H. Spurgeon