Having the rug ripped from under your already modest financial reality is akin to getting punched in the face repeatedly – so please don’t mistake my current state of optimism for haughtiness. But I can sincerely say that living with less has forced me to put my priorities in check and has made me a happier person.
A Gallup study conducted last year found that the magic salary number for happiness is $75,000. The study determined that any amount after this does nothing to boost your level of day-to-day contentment. I am currently not making anywhere near that amount (would love to be though), but I can speak from my experience over the last several years about how having less and living through unemployment has positively impacted my well-being and my marriage.
Back in March, when I was trying to convince myself that I was over losing my job in November, my panic attacks returned after an almost two-year hiatus. There I was, pregnant with my first child and gasping for air like Tony Soprano after his ducks flew away. While I have experienced only two Tony-esque panic attacks in my lifetime, where you literally feel like you are having a heart attack, my panic attacks tend to just eliminate my ability to get enough air into my lungs and breathe comfortably.
My panic episodes last for days instead of just a few minutes and my husband is very adept at spotting them even when I try to play the shortness of breath off as allergies. Most of the time, it looks as though I'm having an asthma attack. I attempted to ignore them in the hopes they would go away, but they didn’t. They got worse until it surfaced into a full blown attack and I wound up in the emergency room.
A few hours before I went to the hospital that day, my father called me and sensed something was wrong. I told him I was worried about ever working again, going into foreclosure and being an utter failure. Unfortunately, my father and I both have a proclivity toward panic attacks. He told me that at his worst, he would be so fearful of suffering from a panic attack – which he said were triggered sometimes by stopping at a red light - that he started running red lights so he wouldn’t have one. I think this dangerous maneuver puts into perspective the sheer discomfort and fear one experiences when having a panic attack.
One day, he said, he was almost hit by a Sears truck after he ran a red light. Sears is the company that laid him off a year before – so we had a good laugh at the irony tied to that scenario.
The bottom line about my panic attacks is that they're mild compared to what many experience. In the panic attacks entry in Wikipedia, it says: Experiencing a panic attack has been said to be one of the most intensely frightening, upsetting and uncomfortable experiences of a person's life and may take days to initially recover from. I probably have had one or two of these types of attacks in my life - and yes, I felt like I was going into cardiac arrest.
My panic episodes also don’t stem from social anxiety – I get them when there is something deeply wrong in my life and I am not addressing it correctly. Panic attacks are a very visible and physical way of your body and brain telling you to make a change. In a way, they’re a blessing. They forced me to confront my fears back in March as they did two years ago.
The bottom line is that I was trying to pretend that I was over losing my job and I wasn’t. I was consumed with the fear about the worst possible outcomes of my unemployment and it was tearing me up inside. I was also trying to put on a brave face and I wasn’t talking to anyone about how I felt. Time and time again, I have found that this to be a losing strategy.
Unemployment is awful and anyone could have looked at my situation and said, well hell, I would be scared breathless too. I was (am) pregnant and paying out of pocket several hundreds of dollars a month for health insurance. The economy was (and still is) in a very precarious predicament and every other article I read was about how the longer you are unemployed, the harder it is to get another job. My husband, a hard-working and extremely dedicated professional with a stellar resume and educational background has been unable to find steady work since the company he worked for folded in 2009. While I was trying to dig out of my own hole, I was watching my husband apply to several jobs a week and not getting any interviews. It’s really not that hard to diagnose why I was consumed with fear.
After a good eight hours in the ER, my husband and I had a mini-date at McDonald's. I ordered a Quarter Pounder with cheese with the special sauce (mayo) that they put on Big Macs. This brought my husband tremendous joy as he loves to see his uptight dieting wife gorge on fast food for pleasure.
In the weeks after that trip to the hospital, I took several steps to rectify this situation. I joined a gym because fitness makes me happy, I scoured the library for self-help books and audio recordings, I looked for work, I opened up to some of my closest confidantes and spilled my guts about how much shit sucked, I poured myself into my religious studies and found solace in our greater purpose. But I think what really curbed the attacks and this may come as a surprise, is that I simply started visualizing and trying to come to terms with the “worst” case scenarios that could result from unemployment.
In the weeks after that trip to the hospital, I took several steps to rectify this situation. I joined a gym because fitness makes me happy, I scoured the library for self-help books and audio recordings, I looked for work, I opened up to some of my closest confidantes and spilled my guts about how much shit sucked, I poured myself into my religious studies and found solace in our greater purpose. But I think what really curbed the attacks and this may come as a surprise, is that I simply started visualizing and trying to come to terms with the “worst” case scenarios that could result from unemployment.
Turns out, they weren’t that bad. One of those worst case scenarios is that we get foreclosed on (for the record we haven’t missed a single mortgage payment yet because my husband is an amazing money manager) and downsize. I pictured my husband, myself and our little girl Olive in a small apartment, with a lot less space and belongings, and it wasn’t bad at all. I pictured two people, still very much in love as we are now, laughing as we do every day and just making it work in a much smaller space. Just taking part in this visual exercise helped me out tremendously.
Several weeks later I stopped worrying and started enjoying life again. I know what the worst case financial scenario is and it’s not going to take away the most important thing in the world to me – my husband.
