And the Winner is Luck: The Great Recession

Someone asked me the other day if my life had ever changed completely and I laughed, because I think it's changed more than once. 


But no, they said, did your life ever really change completely?

Three times.

The first time happened when I was a newly divorced single mom with a five-year-old child.

The second time was when my father's health declined and he had to move here from New Jersey. (He kept wanting to go back, by the way, and for quite a while he thought we were in Alaska.)

The third time happened in 2008 when I was laid off during the Great Recession. I'm thinking about it because I'm working on a musical with a wonderful composer about a couple who is laid off in 2008. It's a comedy because we wanted it to be, but it wasn't funny when it was happening in real time.

The economy started slowing in summer and the first sign of it was that my husband was laid off from his food delivery job. He decided to go to trucking school as it seemed the workforce market was starting to dry up.

I worked part-time at a nonprofit where the executive director was leaving and a new one being hired. As a playwright, I needed the extra time to write my own work, and fortunately the part-time job paid almost as much as a full-time one. But in the fall, the turmoil in the banks and stock market began to take its toll on donations our nonprofit received; and one day in November, at least seven employees were laid off and from what I heard, a lot more followed in our footsteps.

I remember crying in the car as I drove home, knowing my husband's new job was going to keep him on the road at least five days a week, but usually even more. He wasn't going to make much money that first year, and now I had none; yet our bills weren't going to magically shrivel just because our old jobs were gone.

My unemployment office actually sent me to another office for counseling and there was also training available for how to interview. I cried so much during both sessions the people leading them were seriously worried about me. But it was easy to see what no one would say; that investment banks had preyed on a lot of unfortunate people, and caused what we now call the Great Recession.

It was, as Charles Dickens would say, the worst of times. If you were anywhere over 35, no one wanted to hire you when they could hire someone in their 20s and pay them barely anything. I sent out resume after resume after resume after resume. I had a couple of interviews and nothing more. And pretty soon, my savings began to run out.

I had one option left, which was to try and make a go of freelancing. The good news is that would give me a lot of time for writing. The bad news is that when you get up every day and try to find work, you don't have much time for your own writing.

I tried to let as many people as I could know that I was in the market, and somehow, very, very luckily, a former boss called me to work on some writing  projects for her early in 2009. In spring, a friend told me to call a local theater company to see if they needed help with grant writing, and luckily they did.

These two clients became a lifeline to me, plus a few other one-off clients who hired me here and there. But in 2009 I made $9,000 after making $44,000 a year at my part-time job. My husband made about $30,000 and we had to live on that, plus whatever I got in unemployment insurance -- which wasn't much on the weeks I was freelancing.

With a son in college, I had to call the school to ask for help, and luckily there too, the school adjusted their billing. If they hadn't, who knows if our son could have finished college at all? What was scary and sad was that too many millennials had to leave school during that time--and have never caught up since.

Luckily our son's school worked with us to help him get his education. Luckily my freelance clients liked what I was doing and gave me more and more work. Luckily I had some LUCK that kept me afloat, and I will always be grateful for that. In the next couple of years I was able to do better financially until I was making close to $47,000 on my own.

In 2012, I ended up being able to become part of the staff at the nonprofit where my former boss was hiring me for freelance. But I still remember the recession years, waking up every day feeling scared and anxious and wondering if there would be enough work that week. I remember seeing a lot of people falling through the cracks during that recession, and it wasn't for lack of trying.

We think life is solid, but in fact it's really not. At any time we could lose our jobs or get sick or have to take care of older parents. No one wants to think about it, but any one of us could lose everything we have and never be able to get it back again.

So when people ask now about whether my life ever changed completely, I can only tell them yes, and say that chances are good their lives will change too. Someone reading this right now may have to start over just like I did. If that happens, there are two things you need more than anything else--belief in yourself and luck. 

Belief in yourself is important, but it's not just a matter of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The Great Recession taught me I was pretty much at the mercy of high seas--and that all of us are. (I also think it would help to have a government that understands this, and I hope we get one soon.)

Because it wasn't just grit or determination or talent or stubbornness that got me out of it (though it's good to have all those things).

It was that here and there, on my journey, I was lucky enough for the wind to blow my way.


***

To learn more about the Great Recession, visit these sites:

Great Recession History
The Great Recession: Federal Reserve History
What Really Caused the Great Recession?




Recession key photo: Mike Lawrence


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