The last few months have been stressful as hell, and I am done pretending otherwise. So pull up a chair. This one is not polished and it is not pretty.
When people hear you lost your job, they turn into greeting cards. You will be fine. Something will come along. Hang in there. Cool. Thanks. That fixed it. Except it did not fix a damn thing. All it did was give my brain more room to start running scenarios like a disaster movie on repeat. Losing the job is one thing. What it does to your head is the thing nobody warns you about.
I have spent years telling my friends how lucky they are to have somebody in the house with them. They always fire back with how lucky I am doing my own thing. Sure. When life is working, living alone is a dream. You drink from the milk container. You take a bite of cheese right off the block. The pile of pants next to the door is not a mess. It is a landmark. A dumb little monument that says you made it home to your own place, your own rules, your own life. Nobody tells you what to do. Nobody judges the third bowl of cereal at midnight. It is beautiful, when you are busy. But when you are jobless it changes, fast.
Laundry. Groceries. Cooking. Yard work. Pet care. Bills. Dishes. House cleaning. Every single adult task that still needs doing whether you feel like it or not, and nobody is coming to save you. Nobody taps in. Nobody picks up the slack. You are the staff, the management, and the entire goddamn board of directors of your own survival. When you are unemployed and you are the only breadwinner in the home, real gets extra real in a hurry.
So I have treated finding a job like a job. Up at 6. Tea by 7. Desk by 8. Custom resume and cover letter for every application. Recruiters. Network. Rinse, wash, repeat. All while trying to keep the depression far enough away to convince myself to spend 30 minutes on the treadmill. That is the real daily victory. Not a callback. Just getting on the goddamn treadmill. I fail more than I win truthfully.
Five interviews in three months. More than two hundred applications. A 2.5 percent hit rate. For context, I have better odds at a carnival ring toss. The carnival probably has better management too.
You can spend an entire day finding the one role where your resume is a perfect match. Every requirement. Every certification. Every keyword they say they want. And still get shot down because their system needed five keywords and you only had four. A robot decided you were not good enough. Congratulations. You just lost to a robot filter.
Once you are over forty, it gets even better. Everybody likes to pretend ageism does not exist. Bullshit. It exists. It is just not talked about enough to never leave a fingerprint. So you get the haircuts that shave off a few years. You leave dates off the resume. You learn to play a game nobody will admit is being played.
Then there is overqualified. Another word I have heard more than once. It is exactly like dating. Why would a supermodel be interested in me? There must be something wrong. Run. I was always told the point of hiring is to find people smarter than you. And yet here we are, where being too good at your job is apparently a red flag.
Here is where I am. I am past wanting to light the world on fire. I do not care about being the smartest guy in the room. I am back to where I was after my divorce in 2009. I just want a job where nobody reports to me and I can silently kill it for eight hours and go the fuck home. That is the dream now. Just let me be excellent and anonymous. But to get that, I would literally have to strip-mine my own resume. Set fire to half my career just to seem less threatening. I’m considering it.
And then there is the circus. Ghosts who call you all excited, talk for an hour, and vanish like they entered witness protection. Companies that want a 55-minute personality test and a 25-minute work sample they are absolutely going to steal and use on Monday. (this happened) One of my interviews was with a flakey guy talking about a job stuck between two contractors, one who won the bid and one who was pissed they lost. I am somehow still in the running for that disaster. Somewhere along the line the entire hiring process turned into a carnival run by idiots, and I say that as a man who just compared his hit rate to a carnival ring toss.
Meanwhile the money math starts colonizing your brain.
Should I buy that lawn chair or is sitting on my deck a luxury now. Is visiting my friends 35 minutes away worth the gas. Do I really need that. Can this wait. Every single decision goes through a courtroom in your head and the judge is broke. Don’t get me started about world news…..hard pass.
That kind of daily grinding does something to you. It cracked open a window I was not expecting. I keep thinking about a very dear friend of mine who lived alone, worked alone, and stressed alone. I can see now I did not show up for him the way I should have. Life has a nasty sense of humor. It will put you in the exact same spot somebody else once stood in, and suddenly you can see every place where you failed them. He is married now. Living a full life. He came out the other side fine. But it is still a hell of a thing to only find your blind spots after the moment has already passed. Now I know why my grandfather always had a girlfriend and why my grandmother was always single and depressed. Should have opened my eyes sooner. Damn it.
June 1. That is the cutoff.
If I do not have meaningful employment by June 1, I am putting the house on the market and taking whatever offer walks through the door. That breaks my heart to say. But at some point the math does not care about your feelings. I would rather sell in the summer market than sit here bleeding money and pretending hope is a financial strategy.
And I think I am done with Nashville. Fifteen years. Strange thing to say. I love it here and I hate it here. I never had a reason to stay and never had a reason to go, so I just treaded water for a decade and a half. Not miserable. Not fulfilled. Just here. Like a screen saver. So I opened the search nationwide. Anywhere. Even if it means boots, mittens, and scraping a windshield at 6 in the morning. I am already a homebody in the southern winters. Snow is not going to kill me.
I have always tried to find something shiny in a pile of dung. Usually I can pull it off. This time it has been tough. But I am still digging though the shit.
To those of you who have called, texted, answered the phone, checked in, or shown up, thank you. That matters more than you know. Keep them coming. I have no reason not to answer. Unless I am on that one out of a hundred interview. In which case I will call you right back, probably to tell you it was another ghost.
I am still applying. Still trying. Still looking for the next “right move” before June 1 makes it for me. If you know somebody hiring, now would be a hell of a time to send them my way. Better yet, share my Linkedin posts, help me make some noise in front of recruiters.
Otherwise, I will be here from 6am to 3pm, M-F. Pants by the door. Trying to stay out of my own head and side eyeing that damn treadmill.
Q
Q is a meat Popsicle living in Nashville with hopes and dreams of running away to retire earlier than all his friends. Skilled in the witchcraft of not giving a damn about the Jones’ and filled with a did it or damn it mentality. His thoughts are his own, and he is no role model.
