A job-search pep talk, from me to me to me

I wrote myself a pep talk back in September of 2024, after I’d been struggling for over a year to find a new role after Meta’s first-of-many layoff purges.

Since then: I got a job, I lost that job in another layoff, AI came crashing in, the job search got even harder, and general uncertainty about the future—for me, for content, for tech, for everybody—became the constant droning hum underscoring our everyday lives. The more things change, the more they require the exact same pep talk apparently.

So I guess I accidentally wrote this for my future self. The universe keeps assigning me the same brutal lesson, and sitting here today, I don’t know if I’ve fully learned it yet.1

The original piece, lightly edited:

While I’ve kept remnants of my cobbled-together writing career on my LinkedIn profile (replacing bulleted descriptions with irreverent takeaways on the oldest entries), I took out all the ugly, struggly stuff years ago so that I could tell some kind of cohesive story about who I am and what I want. As if becoming a writer/content designer/professional was a straight, smooth line. It wasn’t and it still isn’t.

Whenever I feel like this layoff/job market is the worst I’ve experienced in my career, I try to remind myself that I graduated a couple years before the 2008 recession as an English major with $125,000 in student loan debt. (Still chip-chip-chipping away at it, btw…) I was doing data entry at a Manhattan law firm, trying to break into a more corporate world while working a retail job at night, when I got laid off that first time.

Between that and landing a role doing all sorts of content things at FreshDirect in 2012, I spent four years bouncing from one unpaid/underpaid gig to the next, while interviewing at all sorts of seedy startups and keeping myself afloat in my [now-unimaginably-cheap] Crown Heights apartment while making $10/hour.

I wrapped fancy lotions in Rockefeller Center (during the Christmas season!). I sold cards at Papyrus in SoHo and plus-sized clothes on 34th St. near Macy’s. (I’d been working retail since I turned 16 and could get a job at the local Fashion Bug. First job? Dishwasher at an Italian restaurant. Do not recommend.)

I had one freelance job where I sat in a secluded conference room and entered personal financial data from an executive’s divorce case while listening to “Video Games” on repeat on my iPod. (A real moment in time—IYKYK.) I was smuggling snacks from the Manhattan office’s overstocked kitchen and she was figuring out how to split the beach house.

At one point, I sublet my bedroom and slept on my friend’s floor for a few months to save on rent. I jumped on every free NYC activity I could, and managed to stay out of credit card debt. During the ups and downs of my chaotic career roller coaster, stretching into the present as my layoff from Meta lingers like a scarlet letter on my resume, I’ve gotten good at rolling with the punches.

When I’m “in it,” like I am now, it feels never-ending and lonely. Every time I get a final-round rejection accompanied with an email about how much the team loved me (but just not as much as the one who got the offer), I actively work on not taking it personally. Every time I have to reach out to an acquaintance or former colleague to ask for a recommendation or a referral, I push aside shame by remembering that I’ve done this all before.

I’ve shown resilience. I’ve hustled. I’ve experienced true kindness from the most unexpected sources. I’ve gained empathy and personal insight, and worked to prove myself, even when the cards were stacked against me. (Being an opinionated fat woman in this city and industry has not been easy, as I feel compelled to shout into the void as often as possible.)

After this most recent year of job instability and doubt, I now know the only way I’m going to get through this (again!) is by calling upon the experiences that made me resilient in the first place. A smooth career? Overrated. A quick bounce-back after an unexpected layoff? Where’s the character arc in that? Your girl will just keep riding the wave ‘til it takes me to the next chapter.

As a younger writer I thought every finished piece had a fine-pointed period at the end. I would write a thing that represented a moment in time, a version of myself, a thing I felt strongly enough to say out loud, and then move on and not look back until forced to. It had always been uncomfortable to read the thoughts of past selves, focusing mostly on how naive I was about something I couldn’t see at the time.

As I get older, I’m more focused on nurturing a newfound interest in the patterns and through-lines that highlight what hasn’t changed at all. Palimpsests don’t exist as easily in a digital world, and that’s a shame; there’s a real beauty in the lingering layers that peek out from underneath the hindsight of present-day work.

In a clean, uncomplicated version of The Story of My Life, maybe everything works out. This hard chapter ends with lessons learned, and there are only new, promising, hopeful chapters ahead. And in the long line of a full life, maybe it will! Maybe I’m still in a chapter I thought was over and it just feels never-ending because days are long and years are short.

The version of me that wrote myself a pep talk in 2024 didn’t know she’d get a new job in the new year, or that she’d hate it, or that she’d lose it. She couldn’t have known she’d need her own words again so soon, or that her pep talk would continue a conversation with herself, about herself. What she did know was that she’d survived uncertainty before, again and again and again.2 She held on tightly to her hope for what’s next and let the wave carry her/me through.