Oh my god. Looking for a new job at 50 is awful. It’s so demoralizing. The process makes me feel like Oliver Twist asking for just a little more gruel. Like I’m one of a billion mooing cows. Like my resume is bumping along a conveyor belt with stacks of other resumes. Bounce, bounce, bounce. Oop! They get poured over a cliff into a Sarlac pit.
Nom, Nom, Nom.
~Burp!~
My only solace is in knowing that it’s only a bored AI bot filtering for keywords and sending out stock rejection emails instead of a group of executives sitting around a table piled with papers, empty beer cans and bottles of whiskey strewn about, laughing at all the resumes like mine that come in. Their one enjoyment in life is getting a kick out of the 50 year old women trying to get back into the world of software implementations.
~gafaw, gafaw, gafaw~
Look at this! She thinks she can get back into the game after a year of owning a wine shop!
Ha!
One little note of promise however is how many available jobs there appear to be and how many I am, in fact, qualified for. The quantity gets my hopes up since I can’t see how many people are logged on, hunched over their laptops, applying at the same time as me.
Though I can’t see the hunched , I’m not entirely sure if I like the counter of how many people have applied. Are these the same 100+ people that have applied to other similar jobs? When are any of us going to get a job and finally get removed from the talent pool?
At first - back in May- I kind of enjoyed the process. But that was back when I still had real hope and not the faux stuff. Now, the daily roller coaster of it all is not fun anymore.
Every day, I log on to a handful of different sites (Zip Recruiter, My Greenhouse, LinkedIn, Indeed, and a couple more) and spend hours scrolling. My eyes blur as I scan, avoiding job titles with words like sales, marketing, regional, senior, engineer, and other general jargon.
For a little boost, I hop on LinkedIn a few extra times just to see
next to the job description. Even if I don’t want the job, I like to see the green. This is the faux hope I mentioned. It makes me feel like my mish-mash of life choices haven’t all been for naught. Or, at least, LinkedIn’s AI thinks I’m marginally qualified.
Some jobs are truly dream jobs. Of the 20+ I’ve applied for, five seem pretty sweet. The companies are the kind that care about their employees, strive for goodness, aim to actually help people, and use words that sound like a human wrote the mission statement and job descriptions - or at least a creative human has a well-trained agentic AI.
Yesterday I found a job that had only been posted 9-minutes prior. I was the first one to apply. It’s one of those perfect jobs. The CEO looks normal, like he has a happy family life and a dog that walks itself to the park, like he actually loves the company and gets excited to go to work every day, goes for a run at lunch, and probably drinks craft beers at the hip brewery down the street with his team. The job description made my mouth water. I’m 100% qualified. I would LOVE to have this job. In the application, I tried to express my genuine interest and honest-to-goodness alignment with their values. I tried to not sound too cheesy.
But, I’m not going to get my hopes up. The agreement I have with myself is to get excited enough to reflect my interest when I apply (like when you smile on the phone so people can hear it in your voice), but then let it go and simply feel reassured that there are good companies out there looking for good people to do good things. I use these moments to boost my faith in humanity.
Be careful, Burg. You might sound like an optimist.
I’m impatient though. I’ve never been in a position like this. Not really.
At the risk of sounding like a princess, until recently, things have usually gone my way. I get the jobs I want, promotions and raises happen without my asking for them, opportunities come when I need them, and people come into my life at the right time.
My life has truly been an example of “when one door closes, another one opens” or Rebecca Solnit’s “The beginning comes after the end.” I’m struggling to see that, now.
If your response was, “Maybe these things are happening, you’re just not allowing them in,” or some version of that, I won’t disagree. But, damn it, I feel like I’m trying really hard, like ‘squeezing my eyes shut to make a birthday wish really come true’ kind of hard, to be open to the next thing, to follow the universe’s flow. Several times over the past few weeks, I’ve taken a walk in the neighborhood and have said out loud to the Universe, “Ok! Universe. I’m ready!”
I’m past caring if I look crazy.
Yesterday, on my walk back from the fresh market at the library, I had to have a more intense conversation, though. I said, “Look, Universe,” hand gestures and all, “It’s not just that I need a job. I want one. There’s a difference. I’m really really ready. Like, for reals. So…go!”
I’m getting squirrely.
I’m back to going to coffee shops just to get out of the house and be around other humans. Yesterday, I worked on my book at Demolition Coffee down the street. For a while, I was so intent on trying to figure out how to get my character through Montmartre and up to a flea market in Paris faster that I didn’t realize people I knew had come in. They and their little girls sat at the table next to mine and I didn’t notice for ages. When I did notice, I became the victim of ticklish little girl fingers. To thwart her, I invented a new game called Hungry Duck. Instead of her doing bee, bee, bee, bee, bee all over my neck and shoulders, I got her to turn her hand into a duck and eat bugs out of my hand.
I may be a genius.
Eventually, I needed to thaw out and take my car to the shop for the state safety inspection that was due in May. Since I’m squirrely, I welcomed the long conversation I knew I’d get into with the owner of the car shop. If he’s willing to talk to me for twenty minutes about his experiences opening businesses in wrong locations, then I’m happy to let him talk. Besides, his stories made me feel better about the wine shop. He said, “Realizing you’re in the wrong spot, that’s tough.” I appreciated his honesty.
Still. There’s only so much of this current lifestyle that I can handle. My lack of anything else to do other than work on my book, watercolor, clean the house, weed whack the yard, workout, and all the other things that make me feel even a little productive, is becoming maddening.
I know that made me sound like a princess.
But, again, I’m impatient.
Come on, Universe. I need to buy more of my new favorite underpants. They aren’t cheap. Getting underpants requires a job.
Have I told you about my underpants?
No, no. That’s Alone-For-Too-Long Burg trying to engage in any kind of conversation. You don’t need to know about my new favorite underpants.
Well, just in case you’re interested, they’re from The Duluth Trading Company. OMG> They cover my butt, don’t creep, and are cute! One pair has goats and flowers. I get excited to get up in the morning just because I get to put them on. The problem is that I could only afford six. Since I work out at lunch, I go through 2 pairs of underwear a day. One pair that are my active, moisture-wicking ones, and then after my shower, the fun ones with goats. To meet the needs of my week, I need 14 pairs to make it through.
It’s not just for the underpants, though. Clint says I need the job for socializing. And he’s not wrong. Obviously. He also tells me not to settle and to wait for the right job to come along. But “not settling” implies that companies are responding to me. There’s nothing yet for me to settle on.
My impatience skews time.
Though I had that one job interview that started it all back in May (with the CEO emeritus of a company Clint’s credit union works with), it seems like I’ve been at this job search grind for months. In fact, the real push only started June 2nd. That’s when I had Claude (AI) reformat my resume, move key words to the top, and beef up my LinkedIn profile. Claude looked at my resume and was like, “Oh dear god, girl. Do NOT use that email address that you’ve had since Gmail started. It’s so unprofessional. No employer needs to know you’re a pisces. Go, get an email account with your name, and come back when you’ve got it.” I’m not even really exaggerating. If Claude had hands, he would have done a face palm. He basically said as much.
From that day forward, with my crisp resume, my professional email address, and my more impressive LinkedIn, I applied to jobs like I was sure I was going to get them. I keep all the “Thank you for applying, we’ll be with you soon if you fit our criteria” emails, and also the follow up ones indicating they’ve rejected me.
To be fair, it’s not as bad as my brain thinks it is. Since June 2nd, I’ve applied to 21 jobs and have received fairly quick rejections from only 5. Though it feels like a year ago, it was only 11 days ago that I applied for a job at Netflix. (It was a pleasant surprise that I was actually qualified for the job, though I don’t really have any hopes of getting it.) So far, none of my dream jobs have rejected me. (I’m not going to say “yet” and jinx it. I want to stay positive).
It is a bummer, though, when several weeks go by without any response. I’ve found that I get excited just to receive the damned rejection email.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember the last time I really looked for a job. Not seriously, anyway. There was a two week period in 2023 when I thought about not being self-employed. Out of the handful of jobs I applied to, two responded. Both rejected me. And I just assumed it was because my heart wasn’t really in it. It was shortly thereafter that I decided that opening a wine shop was a good idea.
So, this is new to me. The need. The search. The hoping to be chosen. The next closest experience was in August of 2020 when I finally decided to date again. But even that went better than expected. Sure, I used dating sites, but the whole process took less than two weeks. Three days after I paid for the 6-month subscription to OKCupid, I found Clint on the free Facebook dating app. And look at us now.
Besides, finding a man isn’t the same thing as finding a job. I’m going back and forth with myself about for which one I’m more discerning. I’ll be honest. It’s probably not the one that it should be.
What I need to do is trust the process. Historically, for me, things become available when I’m ready, when the time is right. When I have a clear idea of what it is that I really want. And that’s probably the problem. If the Universe is like a larger, more mysterious and unknowable version of AI, then I need to come at it with a clear request. I wouldn’t just log on to Claude or ChatGPT and say, “Find me a job” or “Explain politics to me.” This is where those Mercury in Retrograde prompts that I mentioned in my last post have come in handy for figuring out what I want.
The prompt for July 2nd was a good one: “If my studio was a mirror, what was it reflecting back to me that I’m ready to stop looking at?” When I read that I was like, Damn. Good one. And, in fact, that’s what I wrote to start my response. “Damn - good one.” I thought about how to be honest with myself. After a moment I wrote, Trying to fit in and belong here. Trying to be somewhere else, like Paris or Missoula.
What I need to do is let go of my frustration with where I am and whether or not I fit in or belong here. It’s getting old. What I need to do is focus on what I need right now, right where I am. I had many intentions when I put together the shop and the studio. Mostly it was a means of escape. But the shop wasn’t a portal. It was, in fact, only a mirror, or perhaps even a magnifying glass.
On July 4th the prompt was, “How am I conflating ‘releasing the studio’ with ‘releasing myself’? What stays with me that isn’t physical?”
Another good one. My answer: part of this is that I feel like the failure of the shop is a rejection of me as a person. It symbolizes how I don’t belong here.
And I know that’s not true. However the prompt for July 6th was, “What memory keeps surfacing about the shop that I haven’t fully processed yet?”
Probably the times when I wasn’t as hospitable as I should have been or as people expected me to be. The thought that I was the reason it failed.
I’m being hard on myself, and I’m aware of that. What’s more is that I’m being publicly hard on myself. It’s not for attention or even for response. I’m saying all of this “aloud” as a way of telling the Universe that I’m working on learning the lessons. I’m processing out loud in case there are any wisps or tendrils of something in the Universe that resonate, that I might be an open conduit. I’m opening my heart, mind, and arms to whatever it is that comes next. I’m letting go of these unhelpful thoughts like bananas in my monkey trap.
When I can get these annoyances out of the way, I can make space for finding clarity. It’s like clearing off my desk so I can make space for creativity and my art supplies.
By the way, since I don’t have a good segue to move out of that moody moment, my watercolor has been coming along nicely. I’ve posted a couple of July’s little paintings. So far I’ve done at least one painting a day, except for the 7th, yesterday. I don’t know what happened to that day.
These are from this morning:
I think there’s still some debris I need to clear away before I truly have the space for whatever awaits. I need to close the studio and move everything out. That’s not a small task. That can’t happen until the end of July.
My thought, based on the things that have historically happened in my life, is that something big will happen in August or September. Those are the months when I’ve made the biggest decisions - like to leave the corporate world, open a yoga studio, move to Montana, and even to start dating Clint.
Something’s brewing. I can feel it. That much I know for sure.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.