Morning. Five-thirty. The light hasn't yet decided whether to come, it lingers somewhere between the curtain and the glass like a hesitation. I sit with a glass of water that is no longer cold and listen to the house breathing without me. How long has it been since I heard my own breathing like this?
I used to think that unemployment was something that happens out there. A graph, a percentage, a piece of news on the radio, a social deficit. Something economic that other people talk about. Now I understand that society has its own language for this state, but that language does not describe me. It speaks of lack of income, of the market, of statistics, while inside me something entirely different is happening - a psychic and spiritual metamorphosis, quiet and merciless, that cannot be measured by any curve.
In the beginning there was only an empty space in the calendar. Then I realized the empty space was inside me.
Every day before had its ritual. Waking, clothes, a role, a name that others pronounced with a certain intonation. Email, task, confirmation that I am needed. These were the rituals of identity, small prayers with which I told myself who I am. When they disappeared, what remained was not just free time. What remained was an exposed nerve. And then I heard it. That voice I never wanted to hear so clearly.
The superego. The inner judge that I had mistaken for conscience. It doesn't shout, it whispers with icy politeness: why aren't you doing enough, why aren't you settled already, why can others do it and you... It insists on relentless productivity, as if my worth were the amount of work accomplished. As if, if I do not produce, I do not exist. And in this silence of the apartment, where no one calls me by my first and last name, I understood how deeply I had internalized this voice. How many years I had lived just to soothe it.
This is perhaps the harshest part. To become unemployed is not only to lose your job, but to lose the mirror in which you used to look at yourself. And then you see who has been looking at you all along.
I keep asking myself - what if this symptom has a message? In a psychoanalytic sense, a symptom is never just random noise. It is a letter from the unconscious, written in an uncomfortable handwriting. And if I look honestly, unemployment came not when I was at my weakest, but when I could no longer sustain the old dissociation. Waking up in the morning and being a person who functions perfectly while inside something quietly withdraws. Saying “I’m fine” with a smile that is too tight. My soul, it seems, could no longer live in this cognitive dissonance between what I do and who I am. And it chose to stop. Not me. It did.
There is a conflict that no one talks about when they tell you “you’ll find something.” It is the conflict between the ego and the soul. My ego wants linearity, security, status, the next step, a five-year plan, an answer to the question “what do you do?” It wants to close the gap quickly, to patch the hole in the biography. And the soul... the soul wants exactly the opposite. It wants a pause. Silence. Disintegration. It wants to let the garment of the old identity fall to the floor and not pick it up immediately. Because underneath, the skin has become too sensitive.
Sometimes I think that all my previous productivity was a way of not hearing the silence. Now the silence hears me.
And I began to understand that this is not a failure. It is a transition. That there are spaces in life that are neither the previous nor the next. Threshold spaces. Anthropologists call them liminal. I started calling it a womb.
Unemployment as a womb. Yes, that is exactly how I feel it lately. Dark, damp, timeless, directionless, but not without life. In the womb, nothing old can survive in its previous form. Something must die so that something else can be born. And this dying is not dramatic. It is slow, daily, almost invisible - like sugar dissolving in water. The ambitions that were never mine die. The need to be approved every minute dies. The idea that I am valuable only when I am useful dies. And what remains is something naked, trembling, real, that still has no name. This is an initiation, although at first it does not look like one at all. It looks like abandonment.
No one prepares you for this training in humility. Society teaches you how to fight, how to present yourself, how to negotiate. But no one teaches you how to wait. And waiting is perhaps the most ancient spiritual practice. To sit in the unknown and not fill it immediately with noise. To allow the day to be just a day - with the dust on the floor, with the stain of light on the table, with the slow water from the tap. I noticed that when I no longer rush to get somewhere, the world begins to speak to me in details. The smell of bread from the neighboring entrance. The way the cat breathes on the windowsill. A prayer said only halfway, because I don't remember the words, but I remember the feeling.
Humility is not humiliation. I only understood that now. It is the lowering of the armor. To say “I don’t know what will happen” and remain alive after that sentence. To accept that you do not control the transition, but are carried by it. Like in a river. The ego wants to swim against the current toward some shore. The soul learns to lie on its back and look at the sky. And this lying, this waiting, builds a quiet, almost imperceptible trust in life. Not a faith that everything will be alright, but a trust that even if it is not alright, there will be meaning. That there is grace even in a day when you have accomplished nothing visible.
Psychoanalysis taught me that you must endure empty space without filling it with a false object. Spirituality teaches the same, but with different words - to remain in the desert without making golden idols out of your anxiety. Both are about the same thing: the capacity to be alone with yourself without abandoning yourself.
Today someone asked me what I do for work. I was silent for a second longer than is considered polite. I wanted to tell the truth - that right now I am working on staying whole while I fall apart. That I am going through a raw psychotherapy without a therapist, which shows me every crack in the way I have loved myself conditionally. That I am in a sacred intermission, a holy pause, in which my soul finally has time to free itself from all the roles I gave it and to listen to its own essence. But I simply said “I’m in transition.” And that, too, is true.
Because maybe that is precisely the meaning of this period that from the outside looks like nothing. To stop. To not define yourself. To allow the old skin to fall. To hear how you breathe.
Is there an end? I don't know. And perhaps for the first time in many years, I am in no hurry to know. Accepting the unknown is not resignation, but a form of love. Love for what has not yet been born. Love for yourself when you are not a hero.
The light has already come inside. It is not bright, but soft, like breathing. The water in the glass is completely warm. And I am here. Without a title, without a role, without a plan. Just me, the silence, and this quiet question that remains hanging in the air like a speck of dust: what do you want to be when you no longer have to be anything?
And perhaps the answer will not come as a word, but as a new way of breathing.
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