I Couldn't Care Less: Feeling Derailed
Created | Updated Nov 3, 2013
Feeling Derailed
By the time you read this it will have been seven weeks since I was made redundant. It doesn't sound like a very long time, but it's starting to drag for me. I got a phone call the other day confirming that my fourth interview since I knew I was losing my job had resulted in my fourth polite rejection. Today, which is Wednesdaym 30 October, I got the first discernible sense in my head that the search for work was getting on top of me
I'm far from on my own here, I know. That of course is half the problem. If there were fewer people looking for work there would be less competition for places and I would get a job more easily. But part of the problem is my approach to life in general. Think of your life as a series of trains1. There's a work train, and a home train, and a family train, and money train and a gravy train (if you're particularly keen on gravy) and any other sundry trains that may constitute key features of your life. In my mind my trains are all in one of three states: working perfectly; working satisfactorily; undergoing repair.
To assemble this jumble into context for you, allow me to apply it to real life. When I was working, I saw my work as satisfactory. I liked my colleagues and most of my customers, and I enjoyed my work. The people in positions of power and authority were, I fear, largely dunderheads, but then I concluded that this is a natural hazard of the world of work. We were making enough money to get by, but were looking to improve that situation by trying to increase the amount of benefit my wife was getting, as her health had deteriorated. At home we were settled as long as we have been since 2007. We needed somewhere that didn't present my wife with quite so many stairs, but we had been pointed in the direction of an organisation which supplied specialist housing to people with varying forms of disability. So work was satisfactory and I felt that home and money were being worked on. Have I made this mishmash any clearer now?
Excellent. Anyway, I guess you can see how the rug is pulled out of this relatively settled scenario by me losing my job. For a start, the job obviously went from satisfactory to in dire need of repair. This obviously had a knock on influence for money as well. I know people who think the welfare state in the UK is a soft touch will tell you that it is possibly to live quite happily without doing any work. It isn't. Quite apart from the huge hassle of coaxing the benefit you are entitled to out of the system, it really isn't all that much money. My wife is adept at making the money go further than it has any right to go, so we are okay, but there really isn't any room for problems to arise. Further to that, of course, the housing progress stalls. I haven't been back to the housing association people because I assume (perhaps incorrectly, I concede) that they will want to take on people with income and we don't have much income so, demand being what it is, we make drift down the list. Or not, I suppose I should ask. I think part of the problem is that my pessimism spirals
Now I don't know whether or not this approach to life was forged in the fires of being a carer, but it is certainly fairly fundamental to how I deal with it. My wife's health is often to varying degrees out of control. The sad truth is that even in NHS Britain and not Tea Party American2 a little bit of money, or actually quite a bit of money, would make life easier for her. We could afford to choose where we lived a bit more, and find somewhere suitable for her. We could get her private health care, which would mean little things like getting her the treatment she needed when she needed it. Okay, so I could go on about this a bit. The bottom line is that I don't feel as if I can give my wife the life I want to be able to give her. I have high expectations of the world, which it almost always fails to meet, but I had settled myself with where we were as long as I felt we were moving towards where we wanted to be. Now I feel as if we're stuck, and there's not a lot I can do about it. This train might be here for a while. I suppose it's a good thing I brought a book.
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