Unemployment diary: I'm a 34-year-old bartender, teaching assistant, and retail worker in Hawaii who's been out of work since April

• The Unemployed States of America takes readers deep inside the decimated American workforce.
• Julia Cornell is a 34-year-old bartender, teaching assistant, and retail worker based in Honolulu, Hawaii.
• She quit her jobs at the height of the pandemic, relying solely on savings and her pandemic unemployment assistance money as funds from regular unemployment slowly came through.
• She says quarantine wasn't at all what she imagined it to be — she started to see a therapist to work through her depression and other issues she's developed during lockdown.
• This is her story, as told to James Charisma.

Living in Hawaii is wonderful but it's pricey, and I've always juggled jobs. Before COVID-19, I worked part time at my best friend's vintage clothing store in Honolulu's Chinatown, assisted with screenprinting classes at the University of Hawaii (as a trade for studio space to make art), helped develop educational programs at the Honolulu Museum of Art, and was a volunteer FM radio DJ. At night, I bartended at a neighborhood karaoke bar and, maybe once a month, put together an occasional punk show. I wasn't making a lot of money but enough to cover rent, my bills, and maybe a small vacation once a year.

I quit my jobs around Easter and started getting really nervous because all my friends and family on the East Coast, where I'm originally from, were basically in the thick of it. My best friend was working at MIT when there was a COVID-19 surge in Cambridge. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, who lives in Brooklyn, had one of the trucks full of dead bodies parked outside his window. I was hearing about these devastating experiences and thought COVID-19 was going to blow up in Honolulu, too.

What made it scarier was that I didn't qualify for unemployment at first because I didn't make enough money last year during a certain quarter. I also assumed that I wouldn't be able to qualify because I quit my job. So I was nickel-and-diming it for a few weeks before finding out about the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. I got money for a month before that was canceled.

Eventually, I qualified for regular unemployment, so I filled out those forms and am now waiting for those funds to come through. It's a slow process. But the State of Hawaii did lose something like $90 million to PUA scammers, so I guess they're taking the time to get it right.

I was also able to get food stamps. They said I could've qualified for them sooner; because everything in Hawaii is so expensive, I never realized how poor I was. If I budget, I have enough right now to last me through September.

When quarantine began, I was excited to catch up on sleep and art projects and just hang out at home, which I never really did.

But since then, I've developed depression and started seeing a therapist for that and other issues I'd been avoiding because I was busy. At the same time, I've become unhappy not being busy. I want to work but don't have a driver's license, am extremely nearsighted, and have always been reliant on word-of-mouth and networking. I wish I was one of those people who can work from home, but I'm late to the party on the technology side and not super-great with computers.

My biggest concern is that everything I enjoyed in life — art exhibitions, concerts, parties, creative gatherings — is going to cease to exist or take years before it can exist again after COVID-19. I'm worried that all of my extrovert skills will become negated if everything goes digital. Meanwhile, my friends on the mainland are starting to leave their homes to go camping or on hikes while Hawaii is actually having to lock down even more than before because people weren't socially distancing.

But things are getting a little better. I'm back on the radio for my DJ gig, which is a form of communication and connection to the outside that's still available because DJs are in the studio alone. I'm also continuing to look for work and happy to try something different, even if it's temporary. I'm lucky that I happen to be a debt-free person and really hoping to still be debt-free by the end of this.