I think one of the hardest things about being out of a job is the daily confusion that comes with it.
Some days I feel positive and upbeat. Maybe I had a good conversation with someone, or I found an opportunity that feels like a good fit and I applied. Or I reconnected with someone and there might be a consulting or freelance project I can take on.
But other days I just feel scared and hopeless. I haven’t had a job for months, savings are deteriorating and I’m getting more worried. I have to get something.
It makes it hard to enjoy anything else. I feel guilty for watching a show or a movie. I feel guilty for doing anything that isn’t helping me get a job. No matter what I did that day, at the end of the day it just feels like, “Well… I didn’t get a job today.”
One of the scariest parts is that it can feel like I don’t know who I am anymore. We put a lot of emphasis on our worth being what we are paid to do. If we don’t have a job, we feel worth less. We might even forget who we are a bit. I knew who I was when I had my last job or the one before that. I had a title and I could tell people what I did and what I did. Losing a job can feel like losing an identity. You’re not that person anymore.
I still feel good about being a husband and a father. I think I’m doing a good job being those things on a daily basis. But if I ‘m not being a provider for our familiy, am I being a good enough husband or father? I’ve been able to work for years now, providing for our family so we could be close to home with our son when he was born and growing up his first few years. I was able to work enough that my wife could stay home with him and raise him. That felt like a luxury, I know it’s not something a lot of families can do now, even though it was pretty commonplace for our parents and their parents. Now most families I know have both parents working full-time.
This whole process and losing the job before this, makes me feel like a failure in some ways. No matter how many nice things I was told, or how I’ve tried to process it in a healthy way, it feels overwhelming and breaks me at a deep level.
I hope that one day I look back and I feel positively about how I handled things. One positive side to the process, for instance, is that I think it’s made me an even more compassionate and empathetic person. In the last year, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs in America due to political instability, market changes, economic swings, in addition to more commonplace layoffs. Unemployment is going to higher levels than we have seen in quite a while. The pain and confusion, fear and dread that I am feeling is out there magnified across every community and it’s something I want to help people with if I can. I have friends near homelessness that I talk to a few times a week, friends who work hard and still need help and support through subsidies, food stamps and goverment assistance. I want to come out of this experience more kind, more gentle and more loving. Having a job, if you need and want one, feels like an important thing that people should be able to get.
Maybe through this process I can learn ways to help others through the struggle that I am going through myself. Through resume support, mentoring and guidance, LinkedIn and AI advice, interviewing support and more. There are a lot of things that are changing in the market and across the world, but I hope that good people can offer help, support each other and make a difference. And that can start with me.
