A lot can change in a year…
Oh, hi! I know it’s been a while and some people may be wondering if I was ever going to write again. Me… I’m some people. If I’m being fully honest, I didn’t think I would. Activating that side of my brain has been very difficult over the last year. Even my photography has suffered (but that’s a conversation for another day). I could blame it on depression, but I truly think that I actually write better when I’m going through something. I think, more than anything, it’s been a combination of 1) lack of motivation, and 2) simply not wanting to admit what I was going through. Maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself, though. Let’s start with a recap, shall we?
When I lost my job last September (2022), I wasn’t just devastated at having been fired, I was embarrassed. I couldn’t wrap my head around it and, as evidence by my last post, I fell into a deep deep depression. It was possibly one of the darkest depressions I’ve ever had in my life, and it went on for months. Sure I was applying to jobs every single day and even getting interviews, but the longer my unemployment dragged on, the worse I felt.
Over the course of 6 months, I had 19 interviews. Yes, you read that correctly… 19! I’ve had people ask me why I kept track and the reason is that I wanted to know just how long it would take. I have a Master’s degree, well over 10 years of professional working experience, and, as far as I’m concerned, I think I’m fairly smart. I clearly looked good on paper or I wouldn’t have gotten the interviews to begin with, right? Something was holding people back from hiring me. And, yes, I fully believed that the right job would come along when it was right for me, but when you get rejection after rejection after rejection (and not just from interviews, but from the applications as well), it beats you down. Having a running tally made me feel as if I had some semblance of control when I had absolutely none.
Not only that, but I had to fight to even get unemployment. My initial request was denied citing something completely different from what I was told that day. Again, I felt nothing but defeated and it took me weeks to finally decide to fight the claim. I’m so glad I did because when my appeal came through the determination from the NYDOL was that I was “dismissed without cause.” Yes, having money is good, but the justification that I was right gave me the tiniest bit of hope. Unfortunately, though, the State of NY only gives you 6 months of unemployment… no exceptions, no extensions. So by mid-March I was, once again, at a complete loss. I had 19 interviews without a single offer. I was seeing the same job postings over and over again, even ones that I’d already interviewed for were being reposted. I was stuck in a never-ending loop.
When my unemployment ran out, I felt as though I only had 1 option: I needed to leave New York. I had gone there because it felt like something was calling me, pulling me in. After 4 years, I’m not sure I ever found out what that was. I knew that I had made progress on myself and definitely changed significantly from the person I was when I arrived, but other than that my time in NYC was just, to put it simply… hard. But making the decision to leave NY and actually doing it are 2 completely different things. First, I needed to figure out where I would go and then I needed to actually get a job in said place. Given my track record of the previous 6 months (and the last 10 years!), I was not hopeful.
I started thinking about what I’ve always wanted in terms of places to live and I narrowed it down to a few locations. All there was to do at that point was start applying. As I knew from when I was trying to move to NYC, getting a job out of state isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Most employers don’t want to wait until you can move and won’t even interview you unless you’re local. After about a week of looking out of state, I landed an interview with a company in northern Vermont. I was excited but skeptical, which I think is a good way to look at things when on the job hunt anyway. Thankfully, the interview went great and I got an offer the following day!
It was time to switch into gear. Look for an apartment, figure out moving costs… let’s go!
Throughout the month of April everything seemed to be falling into place so perfectly that it made me anxious waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things don’t just work out that like for me. That’s not the story of my life. But nothing drastic happened and by May 1st I was moving into my new apartment. Everything just felt too good to be true…
And as the summer rolled on, I found out that it was.
Going into the details of what happened over the 5ish months that I worked for that company would simply take too long and, honestly, it doesn’t feel worth it to me. I am trying to let go of the anger that I feel towards the people involved and truly move on with my life. What I will say is that going through what I did with that company challenged me in a way I had never been challenged before and showed me, more than anything, just how far I’ve come. I’m going to elaborate on this in another post (wow, Danielle, 2 posts? You’re on a roll!), but I’ve spent the last year putting actual effort into healing and processing my trauma. Everything that I went through from the time I moved to Vermont until early/mid-October should have broken me, and there were times when it almost did. I screamed and cried and had panic attacks, but at the end of it all I knew that I handled it better than I would have a year prior.
Where am I now? I’m working a much better job with a much better company and I’m genuinely happy with it. Does everything happen for a reason? I used to believe this, but it’s hard to really know if that’s true when you’ve been through so much. I do think that some things happen for a reason, but not everything. I know that the last 5 years have been some of the hardest of my life. I know that if I had never moved to NYC there are certain people that would not be in my life. I know that if I hadn’t pushed myself as hard as I have this past year, that I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this right now.
I feel like there is still so much more I could write, and maybe some day I will. Maybe one day I’ll sit and put all of these experiences into another book and tell a whole brand new story… or maybe I’ll simply move on. Only time will tell and, right now, time is what I’ve got.
- Danielle
