I thought I would write a series of sorts on ten months of unemployment this past year. If you like it, that’s great. If you don’t, go away.

In February of 2011, I was laid off from my long-term temp job in finance. I was surprised but not exactly wrecked. My job up until that moment was ‘only’ a survival job to me, something that allowed me to audition and pursue an acting career while paying my bills. Aside from the people I worked with, most of whom I loved very very much, I wasn’t sad to go.

Or at least I thought.

What complicated the matter was that I lost my survival job, my stability, my schedule, and then I simultaneously began to question what I was doing artistically. I started to lose my drive creatively. I probably could have handled one or the other, but the combination of the two sort of pushed me over the edge of what I could reasonably handle. It was as if everything in my life was up in the air, not just what to do for work but what to do with my LIFE’S work.

Along with those two major stressors:

I had injured myself the previous October and well into January, I still couldn’t walk properly, nor did I have health care to seek out a professional’s help. In a bigger way, there were also some demons lurking around my heart last year, hurtful things of the past, confusion and anxiety and fears that I had successfully ignored for oh, I don’t know, a number of weeks years of my life. At the same time I was oh, I don’t know, QUESTIONING EVERY SINGLE LIFE CHOICE AND LIMPING AROUND IN A JOBLESS HAZE, I met the man I am now dating, who I am pretty sure is It for me, who I am pretty sure I love in a way that I have never loved before, world without end, amen.

And while that last piece is the sweetest piece, really, the only sweet piece (peace), it also seemed to ignite a frenzy in my mind, where all these factors came together and I felt very happy but also very lost.

A sample of my brain activity at this time at any given moment:

How would I spend my days?

How would I fill up my time with meaning?

How would I pay my bills?

How would I fix my bum knee and ankle?

If I don’t want to be an actor anymore, then what am I doing?

How much of a failure am I, actually?

If I have found the man I want to love forever, I feel somewhat ashamed because what must he think of me that I am unemployed and meandering through life without a purpose?

What could I possibly bring to our relationship? He is so much better than me.

Where is the balance in romance between leaning on someone for support and leaning on someone like a crutch?

When will I feel like a grown up?

Why are other people so grown up and I am barreling towards 30 so fast and what do I have to show for myself and I never thought a number mattered to me but I suppose it does and I have been pushing this down for so incredibly long that I am afraid to be older, to be alone, to wreck things, to be unimportant, to not be special, to have no one clap for me, to not be perfect, to not do everything right, I cannot do everything right, I just cannot hold it together anymore help help help.

And thus, I erupted like a volcano.

Not all at once, of course. Not in broad daylight in the middle of Park Avenue.

Mostly in private.

I bubbled over quite consistently in a brand new therapist’s office. Week after week, we scratched the surface until we hit something deeper and on and on it went. Sometimes I would show up and talk and think and leave feeling so much better. Mostly I would show up and cry for nearly all of my fifty minutes. And when it was over, I would walk down Central Park West crying harder. There was just so much inside that I hadn’t let out. So much inside I didn’t even know was there.

Physically, I was saved by a dancer’s clinic, a part of NYU Hospital. They granted me full financial aid to cover my injuries and so they x-rayed me and poked me and sent me to physical therapy to rehabilitate my knee and ankle joints.

And that’s what I remember most about the early days of my unemployment, in the late winter and spring of last year.

I was just very slowly starting to look at the things that had fallen apart because I didn’t have the option to look away anymore. I was stripped of a job and of direction and so many things came shrieking into the sunlight demanding that I take notice.

So I looked.

And it hurt.

But I started to talk.

And I started to stretch.

And bit by bit, every day, I tried to love myself as much as I loved everyone else around me.

I’m still working on it.