Two years ago, I was a deputy director at a small California nonprofit that provided resources to people experiencing homelessness.
After several leadership changes, I no longer felt I had the support I needed to do my job effectively. In August 2024, I resigned.
I thought I was making a reasonable career decision. I had experience, I had left on good terms, and I even had a letter of recommendation.
I assumed another job would come quickly.
I was wrong.
For nearly two years, I struggled to find work.
I went from applying for leadership jobs to applying for anything
At first, I stayed within my field. I applied for deputy director, program manager, case manager, and other social-service positions.
I searched LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, and other job boards. Because I'd been out of the job market for several years, I also sought résumé help and tried to learn what had changed.
I spent September, October, November, and December applying and waiting.
Nothing happened.
So I lowered my expectations.
Eventually, I was applying for jobs I never imagined I'd consider. I went from expecting to land another leadership position to applying for retail jobs at places like Burlington Coat Factory.
At that point, I wasn't looking for the perfect next step in my career. I was looking for a paycheck.
Eventually, I stopped believing the job search was about qualifications
During the first six months, LinkedIn was probably the platform I used most.
I attended training sessions about finding work, read interview advice, researched companies, and sometimes applied for several jobs in a single day. I customized my résumé for different positions.
Still, employers weren't calling.
Then I started seeing other people on LinkedIn asking the same question: Why isn't anyone responding?
The constant rejection got into my head.
I started wondering whether the problem was my race, my age, or the fact that I didn't have a college degree. I wondered whether there was something about me that employers could see that I couldn't.
I even wondered whether I had somehow ended up on somebody's list of people not to hire.
I'd never imagined being unemployed for this long.
After about a year, I was exhausted.
I deleted LinkedIn.
I remember thinking, What's the point?
Unemployment didn't just affect my career. It affected everything.
The longer I went without work, the more difficult my financial situation became.
Eventually, I had to apply for government assistance.
For a while, I moved back and forth between staying with a friend in California and staying with family in Las Vegas. Eventually, I moved in with my family permanently.
I knew I needed to contribute financially to the household.
That put me in an impossible position: I had to decide whether to help my family or keep paying for the storage unit where I'd kept my belongings after moving.
I chose my family.
I stopped paying for the storage unit and lost everything that was inside.
That was one of the moments when unemployment stopped feeling like a temporary career setback.
It felt like my old life was disappearing piece by piece.
I needed to feel useful, even when I wasn't earning money
I had founded a nonprofit years earlier, partly because of my own experiences navigating the social-services system.
The organization helps people experiencing homelessness and survivors of domestic violence find housing and connect with other resources.
It wasn't generating an income, but I started putting more of my time into it.
I needed something that reminded me I still had value.
When you spend months applying for jobs and hearing nothing—or receiving rejection after rejection—it can become difficult to separate your employment status from your sense of worth.
Working on the nonprofit gave me something the job market wasn't giving me: evidence that I could still make a difference.
The job I finally got wasn't the job I expected
Earlier this year, I decided to try the job market again.
I applied for several healthcare billing positions.
I was rejected from all of them.
Then my daughter sent me a link to a remote customer-service position.
I took the assessment, went through the interviews, and eventually got a yes.
It's a full-time call-center job, and it pays significantly less than I made as a deputy director.
But when I received the offer, I wasn't disappointed by the salary.
I was relieved.
Somebody had finally said yes.
My first thought was, Okay. I'm not blackballed from the job market.
After nearly two years of rejection, that mattered more than I expected.
I still don't know exactly what my future looks like.
For now, I'll keep working my new job and continue building my nonprofit on the side.
Maybe my career won't look the way I imagined it would.
But I've learned that unemployment can make you question your abilities, your choices, and even your identity.
And sometimes the thing you interpret as failure is simply a door that didn't open.
My advice to other job seekers is to have faith in closed doors.
Sometimes rejection is redirection.
And sometimes it's the push you need to stop waiting for someone else to give you permission to build something of your own.