It is not easy. Not easy at all being a jobless journalist.
See, as long as they are working, journalists are creatures who simply do not live in this world. They live in their own utopias, their heads clouded by the power of the Fourth Estate, a power that has been waning fast of late.
A power that is an illusion, really. A power they get more from rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty in the course of their work.
The power of wielding the pen and notebook, the recorder and camera like a gun, and cocking these on the heads of the mighty and powerful. It is a power that can sometimes get into one’s head.
Then you wake up one morning and the media house you work for announces that you are retrenched. Your contract has been terminated. Could you please return all those ‘instruments of power’ the company gave you?
As soon as you return that company laptop and camera and the press card that you wielded like a police badge, and then walk out of that newsroom, reality hits you.
You feel naked. You feel vulnerable. You feel lonely.
In the first weeks out of work, you are in denial. You still act, speak and feel like a journalist. You call sources; you call the big men and women you used to interview. You call the news desk with story ideas you dreamt of in long nights of tossing and turning in bed.
Then people stop picking your calls – all of them, including your former colleagues in the newsroom who now feel that you are becoming a nuisance. And you move to the next phase of your joblessness: anger.
I did my best for them. Why is everybody not picking my calls? Why is nobody calling me?
The anger builds up and explodes into despair, hopelessness and emptiness and a deep sense of guilt and shame. You start hiding from people. You lock yourself up inside a house that you can now barely afford to pay rent for; hiding from family; hiding from yourself.
And this is where real trouble begins. Let’s meet next week for more from the diary of a jobless journalist.
