This has been the weirdest unemployment streak I've had. First off, I didn't even care for the first month. I was happy to take a mini-sabbatical. Then Diana had her appendectomy and related problems, with a few weeks of me quietly on high alert but not appearing overly concerned. Then I got a little more serious about looking, and there are so many messed up things about tech recruiting right now. That's a different post though.
Mentally, this has been a rough go-around, because I can't separate work from my identity, purpose and value. And to be fair, I was at a job for four years, longer than any previous job, with people that I really enjoyed working with. It was also my most successful run, no contest. I've got the hard data to back that up.
Identity is the least important to me, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't at all identify with what I do. This became more of a factor in the last job, because of the success. It's more of a cultural problem, as meeting people inevitably leads to, "So what do you do for a living?" Even my new doctor asked me this.
Purpose is trickier. We spend most of our adult life working, so like it or not, it's often the reason we get out of bed. When you combine this with midlife, yikes, talk about the classic existential crisis. This is why I've taken the position that true retirement, not doing any job at all, seems like a terrible idea. Even if it's volunteering 20 hours a week, you need something to do. Leisure is good, but to enjoy it you almost need something to balance it out.
But the hardest thing for me is value. Being valued is a basic human need. It's a reason that I'm careful to thank people that work for me at every turn. When you don't have that, it's weird. The recruiting mess invokes a lot of negative feelings, like, "Do they not see how awesome I am?" Logically, I can see and identify the structural reasons that things are broken, and not about me. But feelings are often illogical, so I struggle with this a lot. There's also some level of autism "can't reconcile this" stuff that goes on in my head. For the unfamiliar, that's the thing where you have two states, which in my case are unemployment and my awesomeness, that coexist when they shouldn't.
I got another solid referral last week, so fingers crossed that this is the one.
No comments yet.