The third event that contributed to my depression is possibly the biggest. It certainly had the biggest financial impact on my life. To this day we haven't really financially recovered.
About 20 years ago with just my wife and our first child in utero, we pulled up our stakes and moved about 800 miles away. We did it for a number of reasons: school for one, to rely on each other as we built our newly formed marriage relationship, and to get some distance from family and their sometimes competing desires. Shortly after arriving, and some false starts, I found a job that would allow me to work while going to school and still provide for our needs. It wasn't a lot of money, but we scraped by. I survived several layoffs, and worked my way up to a position that paid well.
After living in a new state and working there for eight years, I graduated from the university. As stated in a previous post, I was making more at this job than I could reliably make in my field. I didn't really like my job, but we had some debt, and we were making some headway on getting out of debt. At my ten year anniversary with the company we were about a year off being out of all debt but our mortgage. That would put us in a position where I could stay there and really chip away at our mortgage, or take a lower paying, more enjoyable job and maintain the same standard of living. There was some good light at the end of the tunnel.
Just a few months after that anniversary, I was called in to the office along with the other guy in the department with me for an infraction. We were both sent home without pay for a couple days, and I was to come in to discuss my future with the company. I didn't think it would be serious since it was a first offense kind of situation. Those days passed and I came in to find out I was fired.
I was told it was something I had been written up for in the past, but that wasn't true. I had three weeks of unused vacation time that I lost. It also hurt that two of the people in the meeting where I learned of my fate were a supervisor who previously told me to fudge some numbers and information for an audit, and the HR guy who I spoke with about my uneasy feelings about that instruction.
After dropping the bomb on me, the HR guy said I could file for unemployment benefits, and they would not challenge it. He said I would be denied benefits if they did challenge it since it was not a layoff. When I asked about my unused vacation time I was told at first he would check on it, but then that I would not get it since it was a termination, not a layoff. The other guy (I'll call him Fred) was written up, but he kept his job.
I filed for unemployment, but never collected because I started working within a couple weeks at another job. It only paid about half of what I was making, and I still to this day haven't really been able to get above that amount. A few weeks later I ended up getting a large envelope in the mail informing me that my previous employer was challenging my unemployment claim. I will allow for the possibility that the HR guy was instructed to do so by his superiors, but that left a very sour taste in my mouth. I felt like I was lied to.
In the package I found a copy of when I was "written up" for my first infraction. That write up consisted of the supervisor writing out the summary of what happened, but where I should have signed my name he had cut out my signature from a separate piece of paper and attached it.
Some time later I found out that Fred lost his job, but I don't know the details. Friends still working there let me know that our positions were not replaced. It was starting to sound like they intended to eliminate our positions, and to fire rather than lay off. It made a lot of sense from a corporate point of view. Their established practice for severance was two weeks of pay for every year plus unused sick and vacation time. That's 23 weeks.
Mostly out of a desire to just move on with my life, and a little bit because I didn't really have anything I could bring as evidence, we didn't even look into a lawsuit. I didn't think it would be worth the emotional stress and strain to hopefully exact financial revenge. It just didn't sit right with my values either. We just put it behind us, and for the most part we have. My wife is truly over it.
Over the almost ten years since I lost that job and the struggles to make ends meet at half that pay, my thoughts sometimes return to this. I don't know that it is dwelling on the lies and unethical behavior leveled against me. Some, or perhaps a lot of it is the "what ifs" of our financial situation. That lost half year of pay could have been a game changer for us. At the same time it might not have done a whole lot of lasting good.
One positive is that I think going back to this in my mind helped me, or more accurately my wife, realize that I was stuck on this and I was letting it have power over me. It was a big piece in my realizing I was depressed. I can't say if I am "cured" of this particular ill, but the steps I have started to make, and this bit of catharsis especially, give me hope that I might have moved on.
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