Neha Kaushik, Low Entropy Volunteer Writer
There are certain stories we are handed early in life—stories about who we are, how we should measure our worth and what it means to “make it.” Most of these stories are stitched together with the same thread: work equals value.
I did not know how tightly I had wrapped my sense of self around my professional life until the day I had to give it away. Unemployment was not just a financial disruption—it was a rupture in my very being.
At first, I could not breathe properly. There was a hollow in my chest that deepened with each passing day. Depression came quietly, slipping into the gaps between hours. I remember the worthlessness—how it crept in while I was washing dishes, or scrolling through job portals, or lying awake at night. I had been conditioned for years to give my energy, my time, my love, my intelligence—all to something that was not truly mine. My devotion went to jobs that asked me to show up, day after day, but never fed the wildest, truest parts of me.
And then, when it was gone, I did not know who I was.
The Identity Crisis
We don’t talk enough about how devastating unemployment can be for the psyche. Not just because of money, but because of meaning. Who am I when I am not an employee? Who am I when no one needs me to submit a report, deliver a presentation or check in at 9 a.m.?
The silence was unbearable at first. I filled it with shame, with questions, with self-blame. Perhaps I wasn’t good enough. Perhaps I wasn’t strong enough. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
But eventually, as weeks blurred into months, the silence began to shift. It became less of an enemy and more of a mirror.
Digging Into the Psyche
I realized that unemployment stripped me bare. It pulled away the illusions of external validation and left me face-to-face with myself. And it was not a pleasant meeting.
For me, as a woman, this reckoning carried an even sharper edge. We are told we must prove ourselves twice over in professional spaces, that our worth is always under scrutiny. Without a job title, I felt dismembered—like pieces of myself were scattered across years of exhaustion and compromise. I saw a version of me who had been near death for a long time, hidden beneath all the “productivity” and performance.
Learning to Breathe Again
Slowly, I started to ask different questions. What if I am not my paycheck? What if I can create a life measured by something deeper than deadlines?
I began to breathe—not the shallow breaths of survival, but deep, conscious breaths that connected me to the present moment. I went outside. I listened to the forests. I let the trees remind me that being alive is not a competition or a quarterly goal.
Unemployment, as crushing as it was, pushed me toward the very things I had always longed for but never gave myself permission to explore. Energy work. Incantations whispered into the night. Healing practices that felt older than time itself. I began to piece myself back together, not as an “employee” or a “professional,” but as a woman walking in rhythm with soul work.
The Other Side of Worthlessness
Here’s the truth: worthlessness never truly leaves. It lingers, testing you, asking if you will fall back into old ways of defining yourself. But if you are persistent—if you are willing to dig deep into the psyche, to sit with the discomfort, to look at the wounds—you will find something extraordinary.
You will find yourself.
For me, that self was not a worker or a title. She was something older, wilder, almost forgotten. She was the girl who once believed in magic, who could sit under a tree for hours and listen to the wind. She was the woman who carried ancestral memories of healers, dreamers and shamans. She was the one who had been buried under years of showing up for someone else’s agenda, but who had never truly died.
Unemployment gave me back to her.
A Life Outside the Paycheck
Now, I know this: there is a way of being that exists entirely outside of a paycheck. A way of being that is not about performance, but presence. Not about efficiency, but essence.
It is not an easy path. It demands unlearning decades of conditioning. It demands courage to stand in front of friends, family, society and say: I am more than my job. I am more than my salary. I am more than my productivity.
But it is a path worth walking.
Unemployment nearly broke me. But it also made me. It forced me to see the illusions I had been living inside. It tore away the masks and returned me to the forest, to the fire, to the sacred rhythm of soul work.
If you are walking through that valley right now, I will not romanticize it. It hurts. It confuses. It strips you raw. But if you can endure, if you can keep asking the deeper questions, you will connect with the ancient roots of yourself, you will know.
And that kind of knowing cannot be taken away by any paycheck.
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