Episode Notes

Being unemployed [for a third time] in New York crushed me and this time around, the additional bump in benefits, because of the pandemic, was gone. There were more rules and monitoring than before. I was embarrassed by being unemployed at my “big old age” in my late 30s. But after every storm, there’s supposedly a rainbow. It would take me another year to see that. Tonja Stidhum, a writer, director, and producer, whose work I knew from The Root, a Black-centric online magazine, was vocal about her unemployment on Twitter. We connected about navigating the ebbs and flows of our industry (Hollywood), the come to Jesus moment of being unemployed in your late 30s, and the story we were assigning it.