Today is the second day that I've been without a job.
Although it's due to the end of the contract, I still feel kind of lost. That was my first contract, and it's weird to look back and think that even though I knew it was going to end... it still ended.
Honestly, if you had asked me last week whether or not I was feeling confident about what my next step was going to be, I'd tell you that I'm walking forward to the next phase in my career, but --thanks to a lot of little doubts placed by those closest to me-- I no longer feel so warm and fuzzy inside. I constantly hear "It's hard out there", "What's your plan?" and even the contractor who is replacing me was out of work for a year before he found something1. Which has caused me to stay up tonight to write this down, get it out of my system and onto my filesystem.
The fear
The fear is that I won't find some kind of employment soon. In my mind, I have constant questions floating around.
What if I could never find someone to hire me again?
What would I do to make income?
The parent in me jumps up and screams "I'd do anything to make sure that my family is happy and well taken care of", but I can't feed a family on good intentions and I'm not the kind of person to go out and rob others. Although, I have started looking around the house for things that we can sell.
The Plan
The plan or desire at this point, is to take the next couple of days thinking about what I really would like to do if I wanted to run my own business. In case, I don't get a phone call on Monday-Tuesday, what would I like to do to bring in the money. I'm not going to fool myself that I'm going to make something over night, but I'd certainly like to spend more time on making something other than comments on other people's blog.
Ultimately, I want to move from wantabe to somebody in a lot of areas in my life.
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At first, I thought the idea of being a contractor was awesome. Employers like to think of you as kind of a hired gun; you come in do the job and leave. After doing it a year and talking to the other contractors and some of the people who used to be contractors, I now think of it as being a prostitute with the old joke that you don't pay a prostitute for sex, you pay them to leave. A lot of people seem ok with the idea that we are hired with the idea of being replaced and with the economy and globalization being what it is, I can't find too much fault with companies doing that. ↩