Rachel M. Wolfe tells the story of a little statistic…

Statistics are a fact of life. One in three children will break a limb by age ten; 80% of people who graduate from college will find a job but not in their area of study; there’s a 30% chance of having a bird poop on your car everyday. We live by rules like these, often without asking how they’re calculated. Some of them strike fear deep in our hearts. But what happens when the statistic becomes you?

I’m fairly certain that not a single statistic listed above is right (I’m sorry to say, but I made them up). However, according to The New York Times, nearly 10% of the population in the United States is unemployed. The New York Post argues a rate closer to 22%.

According to the US Government, I am unemployed. The day I became one of those numbers is one I’ll never forget. I often go over and over it in my mind thousands of times in a single 24-hour time period.

Relieved was the word that would best describe the initial emotion I had when I sat in that conference room, like so many other people had and would in the months that followed. For weeks, even months, I had sensed something was going on. After having taken a week off for a staycation – an increasingly popular holiday option – I was refreshed and ready to work hard. I was only met by disappointment when there was nothing to do. After I re-filed, re-wrote, organized, assisted everything on anything I could, I realized there just wasn’t any work to do.

For weeks I tried to look busy. Bustling here, bustling there, and hoping not to get caught searching for a job or for anyone to catch wind that I was looking elsewhere. In short, I knew it was coming for a long time. So when they sat us down, at least 20 of us, to deliver the news, I did my best to contain my sense of relief. That night, I walked home feeling light, a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders and mind. Later in the week, I even celebrated a little with some girlfriends. I had severance, my ambitions, skills, and experience up my sleeve. I was just so happy for all the possibilities I felt were going to open themselves up to me.

Six months later, not a single office or person had returned an email, call, or networking attempt. I’d been looking for work for a total of eight months by then. I wasn’t feeling so ambitious or hopeful anymore. The glow of a new life was starting to wear thin and I wore a new look, one that was tired and angry.

Fast forward one year. April 18, 2010. The anniversary of my 18 months of unemployment wasn’t a day for celebration. I certainly wasn’t suitable for human consumption, but something did finally click for me. The day I had been looking forward to had taken a full year and half to get there. This anniversary was one I had promised myself I would never meet, just like the annual anniversary that had passed six months prior. In the absence of clanking champagne glasses or a paycheck, was the day all the lessons, advice, impulses, and memories started to make themselves clear to me. From here, I was able to form my story. Not the story that had been, but the story that I wanted to be.

Before we get to that story, some might wonder what I did with all that time. Time is something that feels a burden, omnipresent and overwhelming when you’re unemployed. All the time previously spent managed by someone else became all mine. As many people learn, as we age, time is more valuable than money.

In this way, I have enjoyed many riches. Unlucky in work, I am abundantly lucky with the friends I have and the family that so graciously supports my efforts, pains, and triumphs. The feast, famine life is one I’ve become more acquainted with than I would have liked, but so it has been. Seemingly having it all with a job, a boyfriend, a cute apartment, and plans for a vacation, I had learned to feast my sights on possibility when I became unemployed, single, and staycationing in 2008. Over the two years I did my best to regain a sense of self, stability, and purpose. I applied to grad school, was married on a beach, traveled, spent time with friends, and landed a solo exhibition for my new work, photography.

Busy would be a bit of an understatement in describing the way I managed my way through these years, moving six times and still smiling. But on that day, mid-April in 2010, I looked around me, still unemployed, divorced, a grad-school reject, and saw more options than I thought I would, but they all boiled down to two. I could crumble into a crying heap on my bedroom floor or I could stand back up, reorient myself, and choose a new direction. So I chose to proactively not feel sorry for myself. The time to let go of grief and make room for happy had come, overwhelming, in a wave over me.

I’d always dreamed of a day like this, watched them in movies, read them in books. Growing up, I believed our lives all hinged on these monumental days: graduation, marriage, the birth of a child, and moments of epiphany. And so the cycle continues. On that day I realized many things, but my day of revelation was only the beginning, not a crux, something to hinge the rest of my life on.

Our lives are a complex web of stories and experiences often referred to as “the ride.” So why is it we seem to compartmentalize those lives into oversimplified terms and boxes? Life tends to look more like a map – with intersections, wide expanses of nothing, mountains, valleys, deserts, and forests — than it does a container, and the only qualified cartographer is the one holding the map. Go ahead and try to let someone draw on your work of art, your life, your map, and I bet you’d be surprised how defensive you’d get. That map is yours, just like my map is mine.

Each of our lives is a journey we write ourselves into. While we can pick all the components, in letting go of what we can’t control, we gain energy to apply to what we can change. The most positive change I’ve been able to make out of this experience has been the alterations and revisions to myself. That’s nothing a single word or story can describe.

The days since rampant rumination over my situation aren’t entirely over, but a little bit further down the road, behind me. I don’t read the statistics anymore. Besides, they’re probably made up, and isn’t everything made up anyway? I think that it is, and I’ve made up my mind. I’ll continue to draw my own map, but this time, with my heart — not from the past, but drawing from the dreams I have for the future.