To be unemployed is to know fear and uncertainty with a healthy dash of paranoia thrown in for good measure. You live in a constant state of unsettled restlessness and near panic.

You can’t sit down a simply read a good book or enjoy a good TV program without feeling a sense of guilt that you are not job hunting.  You spend almost all your waking hours tied to your computer, hunting through the job boards, tweaking your resume to match job descriptions and composing professional sounding cover letters. You apply for positions you don’t really want, but the pickings are slim, so you can’t really afford to not apply for everything. So you try sound like this would be the Best Job Ever in your cover letter. But it’s OK; you probably won’t get the job anyway.

Then, one day you realize there is nothing more to apply for. You have applied for everything you could possibly do and, until something new, is posted, you have to just wait. You fight another tide of panic.

You always have to be ON, because you don’t know when someone from a company where you have applied is going to call you and do a phone screen. However, the damn phone never seems to ring, so you are constantly checking it to see if it is turned on. It is. Then you realize it’s not ringing because that no one wants to talk to you. Then you resist the urgent go back to bed and stay there for 6 months.

You constantly check on the amount of money left in the bank, and for the thousandth time, figure out how long you have before you have to call the bank and say, “Come take the keys to the house.” You wonder what you will do with the dog if you lose the house. Your brother-in-law makes jokes about your family moving in with him, but you both know he’s only half joking.

Every cent spent is cause for panic because you are that much closer to being unable to pay your bills and homelessness. You shop at Wal-Mart to save money on food, instead of your local unionized supermarket, and you feel dirty for doing it. You don’t go out to the movies or meet your friends for lunch.  You obsessively go around the house turning off lights. You give up soda and buy cheap shampoo. You know where the cheapest gas is at any given moment. Your only spurge is your new Interview Suit, and you got that on sale.

You worry about the effect on your family. You try not to be short-tempered, you try not to cry in front of them, but you fail on both counts. You wonder if you should let your daughter try out for cheer, because you are not sure if you will be able to afford the uniform. You wonder if you will be able to live up to your promises to help your son with college.

Your husband tries to be supportive, but if he says, “It will be OK” one more time, you are going to throttle him. It won’t be OK until you get a job.

You used to be a news junkie, but you avoid the news now because the endless chatter about the jobless figures and the dead economy make you want to go throw yourself off the nearest cliff.

Your mind never seems to shut off; you lie in bed at night, watching the ceiling fan go around and around and around. You wake up in the middle of the night and obsess some more. You begin falling asleep in front of the TV because that’s the only way to shut down your brain long enough to sleep. Then you get up the next morning and it starts all over again.

You wonder how you wound up in this position. You did everything “right”. You were reliable, you did good work, you went the extra mile, took on extra duties, worked overtime when needed to get the job done, and this is the thanks you get? Twenty years of service, down the drain simply for being on the wrong project at the wrong time; while people who have less time in and fewer skills are still drawing a regular paycheck. That guy who was known far and wide for sleeping at his desk and never getting anything done? Employed. The kid who was hired only a few months ago and barely knows how to turn the machine on? Employed.  You, the top ranked employee in the group? Unemployed.

It’s not fair, dammit.

Then you go check the job boards again.