Bird In a Rusty Cage

Trapped By Poverty:

Once you are on the dole, there is less chance of finding work than if you are already employed... I did know this before my last contract ended, and so I gave myself a comfortable two months to find work and started off with a very selectable few job offers which I thought would be good enough for me - ie, a step up the golden career escalator, that would speed me up to the heavenly gates of job status and steady income. However, after two miserable interview fails and countless rejection letters, I suddenly realized that my contract was speeding to a rather abrupt end and I was going to have to seriously consider signing my life over to the benefit system once again. And once I had signed on the dotted line, my job opportunities were going to plummet to a skeleton crew of agency work/no skills required/night shift at Asda. Not that there is anything wrong with jobs such as those, but to me it felt like I had take one step forward and twenty million steps back into the gloom of stacking shelves in Tesco.

Not only does signing onto benefits limit your job search, but you slowly get used to the days of doing nothing, and it breeds low self esteem (when asked "what do you do?" its not easy to mutter back "I'm in between jobs") but also a lack of motivation and ambition. You watch the days go by, and as each rejection letter (or deadline) goes by with a big No, you start to think "is it me? can they smell the sense of despair and failure on the application form?! Eau de Dole or Perfume of the Penniless.

Photo courtesy of pinterest.com/lightwading/bird-cages/