Adventures in Unemployment

Sarah Lynn deserved better!

Is this the best topic to write about after designing a website with the intention to create a more solid professional presence in the hopes of escaping the situation in the topic? Of course it is! Was that first sentence too long? Definitely not.

I think that usually, when people start a sentence with, "Like so many others...," there really aren't that many "others." Or, if there are, then the hypothetical speaker's intention is less about mingling with the herd so much as it is about hiding behind it. This time, in the final month-and-a-half of 2023, I mean it.

Like so many others, I am unemployed. I spent a couple of years in a contract position as a marketing specialist at an asset management firm, covering different roles and leaves of absence. Then, around March, it started happening.

A 21st century post-Y2K ghost story goes like this: you draft an e-mail to a colleague you need a favor from. You double and triple check for typos and gratuitous exclamation mark use. Then, you start to type out their name in the subject field--and their work e-mail address never populates! Their Teams profile is gone, and their name has disappeared from your Zoom/Slack/Skype contacts.

As a remote employee, I saw it coming later than everyone else did. Colleagues with long and decorated tenures all but disappeared in the space of a few weeks. By the time my managers scheduled the call at the end of April, I already knew.

I'm way too familiar with edited memes of sad little cats.

Just because it wasn't a surprise doesn't mean it didn't sting. I knew my contract's repeated extensions would eventually run out, but I held on to a glimmer of hope that I might be welcomed all the way on board. Still, there were no hard feelings or lingering thoughts of "Is there something I could have done to secure my place?"

For the first three months, I felt like I was out on summer vacation. I set forth some lofty goals for myself. I vowed to ride my bike every day, get back in to reading classic literature, and maybe qualify for some helpful licenses or certifications that would get me back in the employment game sooner.

What ended up happening was this: I re-wrote my resume nearly daily, trying all sorts of tricks and "hacks" to claw my way up to the top of the pile of whatever job I was applying for. I consulted professionals, fleshed out my LinkedIn page, dipped my toes in to the world of online networking. Objectively, I was doing what I could. Personally, I felt otherwise.

The terrible thing about having a whole lot of time that you spend doing the same thing with little to show for it is that it just melts around you. Don't quote me on this, but it has something to do with getting older and getting more and more used to expecting what the day will bring.

Sure, I did other things over the summer. I took a somewhat disastrous roadtrip with my girlfriend to Tennessee to attend a music festival that we didn't actually end up attending. I seriously improved my indoor top-rope climbing abilities and got stronger. I had a brief, intense affair with the video game version of Ticket to Ride.

But the bookends and in-betweens of all these days was the job hunt. The ghosting. The job I knew I was more than qualified for that I got an automated rejection e-mail from, only to see it reposted next month. And the month after that. Logically, I understood that I was in the thick of a, "Like so many others..." event. My luck had to turn eventually, right?

This month now marks my longest period of unemployment. It happened during COVID (Like so many others!), and that time was objectively worse in ways that I can explain in a different post. I'd love to end this on a triumphant, "but I'm totally cool with it and I know my day will come."

Truthfully, it doesn't feel like it will. I applied to Starbucks, UPS, Costco. Not corporate, mind you, but retail; this isn't my first time pivoting away from office work to keep my cats on their spoiled diet of wet food AND kibble.

While the state of Connecticut graciously supports me on a weekly basis, I feel like the longer I stay out of work, the less attractive I become as a candidate. I occasionally make it all the way to a phone screen, and when I say I can do X, Y, Z, and 1, 2, 3, I'm not sure that I always believe I still can.

Has my extended absence from the treacheries of Teams and janky rich-text editors eroded my ability to perform? Can I still create a Pivot Table? If I get hired at a marketing agency and have to make a page in AEM, will my new manager watch with disappointment as I fumble through the endless menus? In so many words: am I already too rusty?

This isn't just my story. I'm far from the first to write about this topic or employ the use of cat-related image macros to convey feelings that are perfectly explained with words; the cats are just funnier.

I see my situation written out near daily on Reddit in r/recruitinghell and in many LinkedIn posts. I see happier endings and a determined, scrappy attitude of perseverance on the latter more often than not (the former is where the really hot, occasionally unhinged takes are written), and I'd like to cut this planned series of musings short and write about marketing automation and SEO, or something.

Believe it or not, coming soon to my as-yet unpublished Wix blog: How I Did it Last Time and Why It Really Was That Much Worse. Title undecided.