What is the Self Worth?

As days drag into weeks and weeks drag into months of this period of unemployment, I begin to question why so much of our self worth is tied up in what we do. It came to me this evening when I had yet another of those lovely emails that start out "thank you for your interest in..." and end with "decided to pursue other candidates." Yes, at least the company is taking the time to let me know and I appreciate it. But when the application was made late on a Saturday and the response comes early on a Sunday, you just know that no human has looked at your resume. It makes me angry. And hurt. And frustrated. Once again I am being rejected out of hand. Because...wait for it... I am apparently rejectable, apparently worthless, apparently useless. Because I am unemployed and that makes me a loser.

Whoa - wait! How did I get from one computer spitting out my resume to being worthless? Seriously - how does anyone make that kind of leap of reasoning, wholly without net or safety harness? I think we all do. For various reasons. We don't have the title, or the success or the position we envisioned - or worse yet - that we think we are supposed to want. But then throw in a lay off, the rigors of that weekly unemployment filing with the endless questions, the log of jobs applied for and the feeling of suspicion that surround it and suddenly it can be very hard to haul yourself out of bed in the morning.

I am unemployed, laid off from a company that was seriously foundering. I wasn't fired due to some heinous mistake, or due to an overwhelming series of small but consistent goofs. It just happened. To me and a large number of my fellow citizens. But what I am not is a loser, a slacker, a dolist, or even that currently trendy term - a victim of the current economic crisis. So I choose to not believe that I am somehow worthless because I didn't happen to hit enough of the key words in my resume to make a computer happy.

I expected that there would be a certain level of rejection. I never expected that I would get the first job I applied for. So now I fight the cumulative effect of it all. I am so much more than what is scribbled onto two sheets of paper. All that was passed over was a list of my previous jobs, a sampling of some of my work accomplishments, and some nice formatting. It wasn't an indictment of who I am.