Caitlin: The Unemployed Professional.

I was laid off yesterday. I saw it coming. Truth be told, I was wishing it would come. My work situation was really awful: a long commute, strange hours, a boss who rarely knew what was going on, general dissatisfaction with all my tasks, the knowledge that I would never really be proud of what I was doing. For the past two months I have been looking for another job, and beyond some obviously not-so-productive interviews, I haven't had much luck. But I had to get out of there, a.s.ap.

I guess in taking all that time off to go to those interviews, to stay home when I was too hungover to get on the train, or when I just wanted to hangout with my boyfriend, I managed to get myself laid off. But here is the kicker: I got laid off with severance, and benefits. Enough severance that I don't have to worry about rent for a couple months. Enough severance that I actually sort of feel like I won at whatever game me and Mr. Boss Man were playing.

I suppose there really is no sadness in losing something you're not proud of and don't believe in. I never liked the company I worked for or what they did business-wise. I never saw myself growing with them, or cashing in my stock options. The money was my only incentive to stay, and as I found out yesterday at a meeting with a temp agency, I could make more just doing standard reception stuff --- which, as idle minded as it is, I sort of like.

I often find myself so caught up in other excitement: the books I am reading, the things I am writing, the politics of the world, the food I want to cook, the sex I want to have, that I can't pin down my passions as they pertain to "a job". And sometimes I wonder if I am a "handicapped" feminist, or just a lazy piece of shit.

Virginia Woolf wrote about this in her essay, "Professions for Women", and this morning, in a moment of nastolgia, I found a piece I wrote about Wolf's essay while I was basically unemployed and living in Brooklyn....and here it is for you*:

(*I haven't looked at this in two years. I cut out some stuff that was dreadful, and the rest could definitely use some work---but I was broke and depressed at the time, cut me some slack!)

Reflection on “Professions for Women” by Virginia Wolf

4/25/06

Lately I have felt gutless and without urge. My thoughts, though honest and light, have been based on nothing more than daily arousal by other people’s nice shoes and my own conflict dealing with my messy bedroom and desire to be outside all day. My moleskin hasn’t been properly creased with the heavy weight of my left elbow in weeks. I cannot say I have been too busy to write. I cannot say that I have been numb and cold to all raw emotion that the instinctual writer finds necessary to pour onto the page. I have more than anything else, just felt silenced.

In January I moved to a new place in Brooklyn, and I have now just really begun to settle. The urban culture and pace of life just consumed me for the first few months. I spent my time with a few different men, trying to be comfortable with the idea that I too, am a New York woman (which I later discovered I am anything but). I wanted to explore the city and learn to navigate the subway. I wanted to make new friends. And the last thing I thought about was scribbling it all down. It was all so new and I had hardly had a chance to reflect on any of it. Not only that, but I had no real emotion to prescribe to it. It was just happening, and I was doing more participating than observing. It was less of “a moveable feast” and more of a bacchanalian purge.

Upon reading “Professions for Women” by Virginia Woolf my eyes began to water and my heart began to race. She was right. So right about everything. In her description of the causal relationship between a female writer wanting to write but being distracted by her own demons, I found such an astute connection to the current events of my own life. I was at once comforted by the truth of her observation and then alarmed by the dated nature of her article. In my small two bedroom apartment that I share with a female roommate, am I really subject to the same kind of “Angel of the House” experiences? And if so, what am I doing wrong? I have to say, for all the joy “Professions for Women” brought me, it also carried with it a hefty load of guilt.

In “A Room of One’s Own” Woolf states that what a woman needs is not just her own place to write but the financial support to do so, so she has the time to stay home with her pens and paper. I have all of that, pretty much. I have time and space, and two dollars in my pocket to get coffee for energy, so why do I still feel so linguistically empty?

After much consideration I rationalized that what is distracting me from writing, more than anything else, is my age and my experience. As Woolf states in “Professions…”: “…a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity”. And how can that be possible for me, being a young twenty two year old woman living right outside of New York City? All of my friends are going to corporate parties, dating disingenuous but handsome people, shopping for overpriced clothing in obscure boutiques, and I am watching it all while at the same time trying to catch it on paper. Everything is happening so fast and there is no quiet fisher-girl in a rowboat, just a confused self-conscious Caitlin stuck in a pretentious and superficial expedition through white rapids, desperately trying to keep her pen steady and her paper dry. It is all very messy and it is all very disenchanting.

(...ed. this paragraph was boring and poorly written so I cut it).

In deciding that I am not perfect and but one dry spell does not a failed writer make, I realized something, something Woolf also acknowledged about herself: I am not a professional woman. I am not corporate. I know nothing of business and nothing of being a businesswoman in the business world. Bless those women, but I am not one of them. I am an apprentice to academia, and to writing. That is my profession, and it is a profession that can and must be treated differently. We can, as writers, buy Persian cats instead of suits. We can sit and drink a beer in the middle of the day, much like Hemingway did, and not give a damn about anything other than our own thoughts, our own experiences, and our own good punctuation. As Woolf said, there isn’t an easier profession than being paid to tell stories. So I began to look at my experiences as a new resident of the city not as a separate entity to my writing, but something attached; I can live this life, and feel conflicted about it, and still be able to write. I have some thoughts that will never change, though bustling businesses and rich city boys may try to make them. And upon realizing this, I was able to pick up my pen again and find the conscious unconscious and my security, not fear, of being (and even further becoming) a female writer.