As I tried to visualize that number, I convinced myself my coffee-deprived brain must have added an extra digit in there somewhere. In disbelief, I looked at her and asked naively, “Like two hundred and fifty dollars?”
Without looking up from her computer, she confirmed with a noncommittal nod of her head. “Holy shit,” escaped from my luckily insured lips. To that exclamation, she looked up at and said “Good thing you have insurance.”
Then it hit me. In 100 days, my good luck of being insured by my mother’s health insurance policy will run out. In 100 days, my post-college soul-searching journey will become risky bank-breaking dead end. In 100 days, in additional to being stultifyingly unemployed, I will also be painfully uninsured.
And so, with this realization, I did what every rational human being does when they come to these strikingly obvious yet terrifyingly tangible realizations: I panicked, wished for a strong drink and curled up to mental fetal position.
The mental fetal position, a position I have perfected after years of unsuccessfully trying to face my fears, has become quite useful in these past few weeks. In August, the unemployment rate hit 6.1%. September saw the loss of over 100,000 jobs. Wall Street is begging for a 700 billion dollar bailout. The Dow dropped 7 percent on Monday. And the four horsemen are saddling up as I write.
But just when I was salting my wrist for another shot of fear, I got some sobering inspiration from where else than the wise shores of Jersey. My journalism Yoda, a begrudging New Jersey’ian, told me in his brilliantly simple manner, “Niki, it takes just as much energy to have faith as it does to have fear.”
So I took his advice and dyed my hair red.
Yes, it is a silly symbolic act that probably won’t help my job search process (unless there is some weird niche market for redheaded journalists) but it was an action nonetheless. It forced me to defrost my frozen confidence and faithfully leap into a future of uncertainties.
So on this first day of my 100 days (or less) of unemployment, I have learned the most important lesson of the job hunt: you need a big gulp of faith and a little bottle of red hair dye.
