On a Wednesday morning in June 2016, I was called into a meeting and told I’d be losing my job in September.
I was devastated. At 33, I really thought I’d made it. I was working hard for a cause I believed in with people as passionate as I was. How could this be happening? What was I supposed to do now?
I went home that day in a daze. In the days that followed, I told myself I’d be fine and dismissed all the “funemployment” jokes from friends. This was merely a bump in the road and I’d be back at work in no time.
Except, I wasn’t.
The journey begins
I began receiving unemployment benefits in late September. Once a week, as I submitted the required proof of jobs that I had applied to, I told myself that week would be my last. But one week turned to two, then four, then eight. It hit me that I had been made redundant at a time when many organizations in my field were freezing their hiring for fear of losing funding depending on who won the 2016 US Presidential Election. Unemployment was supposed to be a temporary setback, and yet here it was, slowly becoming my reality.
I’m an achiever by nature, so I knew I needed to keep a routine to stay sane. Since my office work day used to start at 9 am, I was online at 9 am each day to start my job search activities. I drafted four versions of my resume to spotlight different facets of my expertise. I set goals each week for how many jobs I would apply to and how many requests for informational interviews I’d send. I made crazy spreadsheets to log every position I applied to and whether or not I knew anyone at those organizations.
In spite of all of this, my confidence shattered into smaller and smaller pieces with each passing week. Uploading my resume to job portal after job portal filled me with overwhelming existential dread. I couldn’t shake the feeling that no matter how hard I was trying, I was still a lazy slob. My emotions became very erratic; I would feel invincible one minute and then dissolve into tears of rage the next. Sometimes, it felt like the only thing I accomplished in a given day was wearing clothes that weren’t pajamas.
Turning point
At my lowest point, my brother gave me a call and shared more about his own previous unemployment experience. “You are allowed to rest,” he said. “You’re allowed to take breaks and watch a movie in the middle of the day and stuff. You need that just as much as everything else.”
I knew this in my heart, but my brain wouldn’t let it make sense. It was hard to not view taking a break as wasting valuable time that could be spent finding a job. But why was I feeling this way?
I picked up a journal that I hadn’t used for a while and started writing down everything that came to my mind. For weeks, I journaled out my feelings and didn’t hold back. Sometimes I cried, sometimes I swore out loud at the pages as I was writing. I let that journal have it.
Journaling helped me achieve three very important breakthroughs:
- There is nothing shameful about needing help. The prevailing attitude in much of the US is that it is embarrassing to be on any kind of benefits, and that anyone who needs them is clearly just not trying hard enough. Despite not ascribing to this view at all, I still struggled with feelings of shame around being out of work.
- This isn’t about what “they” did to me. I painted myself as the victim, directing my energy and focus outward rather than inward. After all, it was me who had been wronged, right? I had to open myself up to the possibility that maybe there was something I needed to learn from this experience as well.
- I tied my personal value to my career. I’m a mission-oriented person who has worked for mission-oriented organizations most of her career. I believed I was only as good as the work I could do, and thus felt totally lost and useless when that was taken away.
Reflection
Unemployment felt like the universe pressing really hard into a fresh bruise and not stopping. It was was my pain point. I had to acknowledge my privilege in having access to a safety net that many in more dire straits couldn’t access as equally. I learned a big lesson in humility, and that I didn’t need to qualify my value to anyone. I was reminded that s**t happens, it happens to everyone, and it doesn’t make you any less of a person when it does happen. Confronting these realizations was uncomfortable, but it was only by being uncomfortable that I finally had what I needed to move forward.
I eventually found a new job in March 2017, after submitting nearly 100 applications and going on just four interviews. But I see now that my unemployment wasn’t actually about me finding a job at all. What I dismissed as a bump in the road ended up being a six-month journey of self-discovery. I thought I was too busy saving the world to have time for anything else, until time was all I had. It forced me to live in the present. I would not be who or where I am today had I not lost my job on that Wednesday morning five years ago.
If you’re currently unemployed or struggling with your job search, I’ve been there. I see you and I want you to know I’m proud of you. And if you’re in need of some advice, I want to share three things with you that really helped me stay focused in my job search.
