Unemployment is still a dark and looming issue in this country, but as many who were hit in last years layoffs get back on their feet I read and hear more and more stories of personal reinvention and renewal.

In a recent New York Times Magazine, former Editor in Chief of Conde Nast’s House & Garden, Dominique Browning,  shares an excerpt from her new book, Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness, in which she  details the downward spiral she took after the dissolution of the magazine and ultimately the positive impact it had on her life and her quest for happiness.

The article is witty and anyone who has lost a job they loved will relate to her subsequent confusion and depression.

“Being unemployed is a lot like being depressed. You know how there are millions (O.K., a handful) of things you swear you would do if you only had the time? Now that I had all the time in the world — except for the hours during which I was looking for work — to read, write, watch birds, travel, play minor-key nocturnes, have lunch with friends, train a dog, get a dog, learn to cook, knit a sweater, iron the napkins and even the sheets, I had absolutely no energy for any of it. It made no difference that music and books and nature had long been the mainstays of my spirit. Just thinking about them exhausted me. I had absolutely zero experience in filling weeks — what if it became years? — with activity of my own choosing. Being unemployed meant being unoccupied, literally. I felt hollow.”

The hollowness and depression that Browning talks about is a common theme in the conversations I’ve had with the unemployed over the past year and a half. I’ve written in the past on how losing a job sends people into the same grief cycle as losing a loved one or a relationship. Browning herself mentions the process being much like a divorce.

But the important note to take from the piece (and from her book, I presume, too) is that there is a light at the end of the tunnel for many and it often only comes after the introspection associated with cycling through the phases of grief and despair that come with loss.

The article is worth a read as is her website (if you enjoyed House & Garden, you’ll enjoy this too.)