My week began with the following email in my Inbox:

Dear Joseph:

Thank you for your application to the Las Vegas [redacted organization] for [redacted job], Recruitment Number: [redacted designation].

Your skills and background were carefully reviewed and considered. Unfortunately, you were not selected to interview for this recruitment.

We hope you will keep the [redacted organization] in mind for future career opportunities and encourage you to apply again.

Respectfully,

Human Resources

I’ve been submitting job applications going back seven months, since the end of May. This was one of three applications that I filled a couple weeks ago and the good news is that they were good about keeping me in the loop, first acknowledging the application submission and now letting me know that I’ve been dropped from the hiring process. I still don’t know about the other two job applications, one of them for a Makers space position, I should have heard from first, and the other doesn’t close until the 10th. Knowing the status of one is a good thing. The vast majority of the job applications submitted went unacknowledged and I never got any feedback. Needless to say, while getting feedback is better than none, I was a bit surprised at the emotional hit I experienced getting another “no” in my Inbox. 

I get the risk from an employer’s standpoint of hiring someone jumping from teaching to journalism, for example. Especially at my age, I don’t have the years of experience doing specific parts of these jobs that the employer would want to assume they don’t have to deal with… you know, the off the books day-to-day crap that everyone manages to do to get the job done. They don’t know me and they don’t know if I’m worth their investment of time or resources, especially with local journalism pretty much falling in the toilet, funding-wise. But you’d think with the entry-level, education-adjacent jobs, like at my local libraries, it’d be a no-brainer to bring someone in with 28-years of working with students from low SES communities. But, so far, seven months into this chapter, not one single bite. Correction, I was called in for an interview for a library position three weeks ago, that I thought I nailed. Then the following Tuesday I got the “no” email in my Inbox. That one knocked me down for a day. When I got back up I responded by finding and filling out three more job applications for open positions. I’m really getting a nagging feeling that the universe is nudging me to move in a different direction.

Actually, it’s not really a different direction as much as putting more trust in the direction I’ve been going in over the past year with the increased efforts and time I’ve been putting into my writing and website(s) and online presence. Really, I’ve been heading in the direction the whole of my adult life. But if I have to think about it, I was definitely in this same space nine years ago when I got laid off from my teaching job at Full Sail and, at the time, I kicked myself because I hadn’t been working on my writing enough to have something ready to offer as a writer. Nine years later, now living in Las Vegas, having chosen to step away from my job as a teacher, I seem to have “forgotten” that this might have gone better had I spent the last year producing something tangible like, maybe a book…? I think the working class drone in me wanted to translate my writing into something where I could go somewhere, like a newspaper room, to do my writing. Funny, this was something that didn’t happen nine years ago when I faced similar challenges. Ugh, my insecurities about my worth as a writer, given I have zero track record in terms of recognition or financial compensation aren’t altogether unfounded. And I really wasn’t raised to be some kind of “independent artist/writer” person. Growing up living hand-to-mouth, I certainly didn’t set aside the financial means to be “independent” so that I could take the years needed to produce something like a book. So, here we are, still getting getting the gut punch of “no” or nothing in my Inbox, trying to muster up the energy or audacity to do something that I love and happen to be good at. Okay, let’s get to work.