Forthcoming in Issue Three of Kill Your Darlings is Clementine Ford’s ‘A Bitter Pill to Swallow: Being on the dole, again’.

‘Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.’

My mother was fond of this quote. She was also fond of that one about success being ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration, and the one about doors and windows and imaginary men.

Unfortunately, the only quotes I’ve ever managed to commit to memory come from uncomfortably un-PC British comedies. This probably explains why my life has consisted of rather less perspiration, preparation and ensuing success, and rather more slothful couch-sitting, adolescent giggling and sexual fantasies involving Rowan Atkinson.

Had I paid more attention to my mother’s borrowed words of wisdom, I may have avoided the situation I now find myself in, again: essentially unemployed, largely unappreciated, and wholly dependent on government coin to keep me in house and home.

After brief stints on welfare in both the early and middle parts of the noughties, I have returned once more to the ranks of the great unwashed. At the age of twenty-nine, with the notches of various careers marking the bed post, I find myself lining up at everyone’s favourite hellhole for my fortnightly dose of demoralisation. The dole can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Clementine Ford is a freelance writer from Adelaide who spends far too much time watching YouTube videos and drinking tea. She lives in hope that she may one day find gainful employment.