Many years ago, like many college kids,  I tried to avoid scheduling any classes at 8 in the morning.  Because it was just too hard to drag myself out of bed that early.  But when I graduated and went to work I found out that Life IS AN EIGHT O’CLOCK CLASS!  Rather than maybe having an early class a couple days a week, work meant an early start  EVERY SINGLE DAY!  That was a shock.

Over the years I got used to the early day of work, day in, day out, year in, year out.  Then I did the unimaginable and quit.  Really.  Just quit.  I went back to school where sometimes I had an early morning, sometimes a late night, but never consistency.  And I liked the variation in my days.  After graduation I found part-time work in a library and had some early days, some late nights and again I enjoyed the variation.

But the world changed when our economy went haywire  and library jobs were impossible to find.  So I’m back at the bank and getting used to waking up in the dark and driving through rush hour traffic to sit in a cubicle for the entire day.  Then it’s rush hour traffic home.  Life is once again an 8 a.m. class.

It’s exhausting and sometimes overwhelming.  But I’m working on getting settled in the groove.  The last four years have been, in effect, a very long, very wonderful vacation.  Which is more than most people get.

So I’m appreciative; even as I yawn while driving toward the rising sun each morning.

I’ve been unemployed since last October.  Looking for work is a sobering experience; it starts to play with your mind; makes you wonder about your worth and causes you to rethink decisions made long ago when the world was a different place.

You go to interviews smiling and hopeful, certain that the interviewers can see the value you’d bring to their libraries.  Your years of experience.  Your motivation and enthusiasm for the work.  Your fresh ideas framed in another life, adapted to fit the world of public libraries.

But after months and months of looking and writing and applying and meeting I still have no library work, and that world has become distant and even somewhat foreign to me.  Unemployment benefits are ending soon, husband is still adjusting to his forced retirement.  Tensions mount.

On a whim I applied for an underwriting job on Monster.com, never thinking that anyone would be interested in me, a person who has been out of the business for over four years.  Turns out that though that particular job didn’t work for me it did lead me to call my previous employer who has offered me a full time job and the opportunity to get my head back into the mortgage underwriting world.

It was a difficult decision to give up the dream of working in a place I feel I’m meant to be.
And to give up the freedom these last few months have afforded me.  But it’s an opportunity I can’t ignore, so the week after next I’ll be putting on grownup clothes again and heading into work with the other rush hour commuters.

I know I’m lucky.  I’ve seen what it’s like out there for the unemployed and it is not pretty.  I also know I am lucky that someone is willing to take a chance on me and let me relearn the industry.  And I’m grateful for all of that, and will give back to them more than their money’s worth.  I always did.

But I’m going to miss the way the light falls on the trees in early afternoon.  I’m going to miss long walks with Katie.  I’m going to miss staying up late reading all night if I want to.  I’m just going to miss the possibilities that hover around each morning when I get up.  The possibilities to do anything or nothing at all.

I’m gonna miss this.

Yesterday I attended an AARP sponsored job fair for unemployed people age 50 and up.  I haven’t had to get up so early and dress so nicely in a long time, and it felt strange.  It started at 9:00 in a city about an hour away, so I got to experience rush hour traffic again as well, and I have to say I was OK with that.  Skills long unused came right back as I maneuvered my way down a familiar freeway with all the normal stop and go spots.

I arrived about 8:30 and the huge parking lot of the civic center was filling up.  Inside a couple of hundred people just like me were already in line.  By the time they opened the doors at 9 there were a few hundred more behind me.  All of them dressed in suits, looking quite employable.  All of them over 50.  All of them unemployed.

I talked at length to a couple of women, one used to work in the federal government’s drug enforcement and left to raise her kids.  Now divorced and years away from any work experience she can’t find anything.  She’d welcome a receptionist job if it paid for her health insurance.  Another has been a lawyer for many years and doesn’t want to do that anymore, but can’t find anything else.

The speaker, a volunteer with AARP started out by stating that we might be sitting there feeling “a little bit old and a lot beaten up” as we searched for work.  All around me heads nodded.  She told us to stop feeling sorry for ourselves, that we had a wealth of experience and employers wanted that experience.  But that we had to stop automatically closing doors, that some of us were more inflexible than we realized and we needed to show that we were open to ideas and new things, not  just focus on who we were and what we did in our old job.  We need to show a prospective employer what we can do for them NOW, not what we might have done for someone else some time ago.  And she said the young recruiters didn’t want to see us as like their moms and dads, they wanted to see us as more like them.

I have an interview next Monday for a position that would take me back to my old line of work.  I’m going to practice being hip and young and open and inventive and creative over the weekend.

Because I don’t want to be in the nicely dressed older  and unemployed demographic anymore.