I was 26 in October of 1976. I graduated college in June of 1972 into a bad recession. I had no self confidence and did not get a job until September, when I filled out the form at Sears Roebuck (did not require resume, background, etc.). I lived at home (made $95 a week, $5 more than high school graduates since I was a college graduate) until the Spring of 1973 when my stepmother called me "stupid" one time too many.

I found someone who was advertising a 2 bedroom rental house to share (she had just gotten out of the Peace Corps) and I moved my living from my room at home to my room there. I hated working at Sears, it caused a great deal of anxiety and was wholly different from my life before which had been being in school. I had grown up extremely sheltered and though I had worked summers in college, I never had to share/use the money I made to support myself in any way. My house mate turned out to have a drug problem and started acting bizarrely and decide not to renew her lease, etc. so I was given notice to move out.

My stepmother went around with me, apartment building to apartment building and we found an efficiency apartment I could barely afford (and which she and my father had to secretly cosign for without my knowledge/consent). I lived there for the next 13 years, was terrified I was going to die there. Through a friend of my parents I got a better job at the Pentagon/GS-3 clerk but that necessitated taking the civil service clerical test. I had taken the professional test at the end of college but Vietnam Vets got an automatic 5 points extra and, because of the recession, everyone and their brother wanted jobs with the Government and there weren't enough to go around so you had to score really high in the first place. I was only a "B" applicant at best back then. Anyway, I passed the clerical test okay and got calls from other agencies interested in hiring me, a novel experience for me (that someone wanted me) since the Pentagon job was being "held" specifically for me pending my passing the test.

I took that job and there were no roses because I was supposed to have shorthand for the job and I did not. My department head was overly familiar/paternal, and he would tell people on the phone, "I have a girl here who rides her bike in every day from the Zoo!" (my apartment was 3 blocks from the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.). My department sent me off once or twice a week (still in the Pentagon, it is a VERY big place :-) for shorthand training and I did miserably at it. My boss, a brilliant Harvard grad lawyer my age with no charm/looks/sex appeal whatsoever (he was single, short, balding, and roughly pear shaped with a nasally voice) would read what I was writing upside down and correct me :-)

In a couple years (around when I was 26) there came to be less work to do so I sat around being bored, there was no chance of "moving up" and coworker friends were moving on to other jobs/leaving so I started looking for another job and got the one I stayed with the longest of my career, a non-profit I stayed with for 8 years, until the mid-1980's. My salary in that 8 year period went from $8500 to start to around $21,000 (shows you what the 1980s were like, remember, this was a non-profit) and I learned a great deal and made some contacts, had my first relationship, and started therapy with my "good" therapist, etc. Life started to turn around/take off in 1985 (when I was 34/35) and I haven't looked back.