Employment, at long last

I got a job today.

It was December 1, 2011 when I found out I was losing my last job, and my last day in the office was about 4 weeks later. If you had told me then that I would still be looking for a new job in November 2012, I would have thought you were nuts. I would have said that 11 months was "sooooo far away" and that unemployment was a thing that happened to OTHER people, but never me. Never someone who is young, with 2 degrees and a pretty good head on her shoulders.

But here I am. It's November 14th, and it was only today, after applying to almost 300 jobs, that someone out there finally decided that whatever it is I have to offer is good enough.

Unemployment is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) dehumanizing. Meeting new people and having to tell them that I don't have a job always made me feel inferior. Because "I'm unemployed" does not come off as "I graduated cum laude from a really good school and then got my MBA from another really good school and I also had some great jobs along the way and I'm pretty smart and responsible and overall capable as a human being."

It reads as, "I'm lazy and I like to sleep in a lot."

If you have any measure of fun during your period of unemployment, which I absolutely did, people will look at you with envy and comment about your extended vacay and "how nice it must be." It doesn't matter that it's easier to go out to that dinner and worry about the expense later than it is to say no to those things and experience the vicious depressing cycle that is feeling shitty about yourself because you don't have a job, knowing that you'd feel better about yourself if you could only go out and enjoy some time with your friends, but not really being able to because you can't afford it, thus making you feel even worse. So you manage to afford it. Or at least, your credit card does.

From a financial standpoint, I should have moved home to New Jersey as soon as I lost my job. But even my parents agreed that there was no point in making my life even more miserable than it was by depriving myself of my social life, which, as I've mentioned, was really one of the last things I had to hold onto.

So I spent the last year trying to have as much of a social life as I could on as little money as possible. I said "yes" to lots of things and I said "no" to lots of others and overall I managed to stay busy. But I never lost that feeling in the back of my mind that maybe I would NEVER find a job. That maybe my weird mix of professional experiences would qualify me to do absolutely nothing, and that in this shitty economy that is rife with qualified job seekers, I would oftentimes be a great candidate but never truly the BEST one.

When I got off the phone today, after having been offered a great job at a great organization where I would have a great blogger friend as my coworker (!!!!!! YAY), I didn't know what to do first.

I called my mom.
I called my dad.
I called my grandma.
I called my brother.
I posted on Twitter.
I posted on Facebook.
I set up a celebratory happy hour for Friday.
I composed a Facebook invitation for aforementioned happy hour, complete with a few stats on how many interviews I've had this year.
I deleted the events in my Google calendar that existed solely to remind me to apply for jobs.

And then I cried.

I sat in my room with my head in my hands and I ugly cried like the worst thing had just happened. Only it wasn't the worst thing, it was the best thing.

So I'm excited to start on this new part of my life, and leave this year of feeling worthless behind me. After 11 months of more or less sitting idly by, I'm ready.