If you’ve read a lot of my blog articles, especially in the year I started Unwanted Life, you may be familiar with my story. I have several health and mental health issues. However, my biggest barrier to my return to work, paid work that is, was my re-entry anxiety.
I could easily blame it on my health and mental health issues, as they have been a significant barrier to me and have affected my quality of life. But when opportunities to work full time arose, rather than working as a volunteer, it was my re-entry anxiety that stopped me.
While doing my undergraduate degree, I had a part-time caretaker job, which was fairly flexible with when I needed to turn up for work. This meant I could rock up and work at midnight, and that’d be fine. After graduating, I went looking for work, but I couldn’t do much with my psychology and counselling degree because it didn’t come with clinical hours. A bit of a waste of time, really.
So, I found volunteer work for a substance dependency charity instead, which worked out well for me as I wanted to make up for my past involvement with drugs. At this stage, most of my health issues weren’t known or really a problem; it was just my social anxiety, agoraphobia, and psychosis that were everyday problems, but I managed to push through these, regardless.
When I went to the training for the substance dependency charity, every moment I was there, I was experiencing psychosis. Just to put that into perspective.
I worked as a volunteer for that substance dependency charity for a few years, and I even worked for Mind as a volunteer for a while as well, until they lost their contract with the council in the area where I was working. I was happy volunteering, and looking for new volunteering opportunities was never an issue for me.
However, I was scared of returning to paid employment because it felt secure being on benefits. I have no issues working full-time as a volunteer if I could keep my benefits. Benefits were a security net that I could not only lose if I returned to full-time paid employment, but if that full-time paid employment didn’t work out, it would be extremely hard to get back onto the benefits I was on, which was Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). This is a benefit for people with health issues.
Before my health issues made their presence known, my colleagues at the substance dependency charity I was volunteering for often suggested I seek paid employment with them. But the thing is, there is a lot more flexibility and understanding when you’re a volunteer that you just don’t get as a paid employee. If I was experiencing a psychotic episode or my health had failed me, they were fine with me just taking off all the time I needed. But what employer is going to be happy doing that for a paid employee?
I wanted to work, but I also needed that extra layer of understanding and flexibility to actually work, and I could only find that in volunteer work. This, of course, just fed my re-entry anxiety into paid work. That, coupled with the risk of losing my access to the benefits that had been my lifeline should that entry into work not work out, was a powerful motivator to stay on benefits.
When you’ve been living on benefits, it’s a hand-to-mouth existence, and you very rarely have any kind of savings to fall back on. It’s not an easy existence, and you can quite quickly find yourself in a spiral of debt, which happened to me for a while until I was able to pull myself out of it.
Thus, a return to work was not only a scary thought but also didn’t make sense on any level to me, at least at the time. My re-entry anxiety became that strong when it came to my return to work (paid).
It didn’t help with how stressful it was to sort out my benefits in the first place. This is often a nightmare for a lot of people, especially when it comes to applying for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and ESA, as they’re poorly assessed by Atos.
When I applied for ESA and housing benefit the first time after leaving university, it took over six months for me to see any money. I had put some of my rent on my credit card, and I had to borrow a lot of money to keep a roof over my head because of this. This wasn’t an experience I wanted to repeat. Nor would I wish this experience on anyone. It’s the most stressed I’ve ever felt.
Fast forward to my time at university doing my postgraduate degree, where I got a placement with an online therapy service. After completing my placement and graduating from my postgraduate degree, I ended up staying on with the online therapy service as a volunteer. I volunteered for them for several years, which included during the time of covid.
Besides having to manage my impostor syndrome, I loved working as an online therapist. It fits all my needs really well, so when the owners of the copy asked me to interview for a paid position at their company, I declined. I was happy to stay on as a volunteer.
This made it the second time I could have made a return to work, finally getting paid for my time and energy. But I just couldn’t bring myself to take that leap, not after everything I’d experienced with getting benefits. It felt better to stick with the benefits rather than take that risk.
It also didn’t help with how difficult the Job Centre made it when I was working part-time and claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) to get my National Insurance contribution, as I didn’t earn enough to pay that with my wages. The number of hours I worked and how much I got paid were the same. Every. Single. Week. Yet, they kept having issues with this, and I had to keep filling out all these extra forms time and time again, as they accused me of some sort of fraud. And every time, I proved that I wasn’t.
But it was enough for me to never want to be on JSA ever again. This reinforced my need to stay on the ESA and housing benefit support I was already getting, and not want to jeopardise that. Because if I got a job and it didn’t work out, then they’d see that as me being healthy enough not to be on the health issues-related benefits.
With all this in my mind, whenever a return to work and being paid came up, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I had re-entry anxiety. My concerns about a return to work were founded concerns, but at the same time, I was now volunteering for an organisation that more than suited my situation. This new reality of being able to work from home led to me becoming very aware of my re-entry anxiety. After a year of dragging my feet, I took the leap and made the switch to full-time paid employment, and I haven’t looked back.
When I do look back, I wish I had switched to paid work with the online therapy service earlier because of all the money I missed out on earning.
Because of this experience, I wrote an article on my main blog on the topic of re-entry anxiety. If you’d like to read that companion piece, you can find ‘Re-Entry Anxiety: How To Ease Back Into Work After A Break‘ by clicking here.
Thank you for reading my article about my personal experience with re-entry anxiety. If you’d like this article, then you might also like to check out ‘A First-Hand Account Of Supporting A Partner With Anxiety‘ by clicking here.