A Month and a Half In, and I Am Still In It

A month and a half down the line, and I am still in it. Still applying and still waiting on responses that rarely come. Still without anything landed, even though there have been a couple of prospects along the way that felt like they might turn into something, much like the ones I wrote about last time. Starting over after retrenchment is not something anyone warns you moves this slowly. I think I expected this to move faster than it has. I watch people around me go through their own versions of this and land somewhere new in weeks. And I am still here. Some days that makes me wonder what it is about my journey specifically that is taking this long. Whether there is something I am missing. Or whether this is simply how mine is meant to go.

So much has actually changed about my days, in ways that have nothing to do with job applications at all. We live in Woodstock, and my kids are at school in the southern suburbs, so I used to drop them off and go straight to the office rather than fight my way back home through traffic. Now there is no office to go to. Some mornings I wait the traffic out in my car. Other days I take myself to the library, or a coffee shop, and sit there for hours writing content, searching for jobs or working through the HubSpot inbound marketing course I have signed up for. There is a strange kind of freedom in that, more than I expected. I can go for a walk in the middle of the day. Run errands without rushing. Sit at a friend’s place for an afternoon with nowhere I am supposed to be instead. Some days I actually enjoy it.

Here is where I actually am with the rest of it, though. I believe things happen for a reason. I know that belief can sound easy to hold when you are not the one sitting in the middle of the mess, but I hold it anyway. I think this stretch of my life is a complete cleanse of everything I thought I knew, everything I built my identity around for nine years. I think it is clearing space for something to pivot in a way I could not have chosen for myself if I had tried. I am trying to embrace that. Some days I actually do.

And then something like this week happens. My daughter, who is in grade seven, has been accepted into the high school she has wanted to go to for years, and we are ecstatic, genuinely; that part is not complicated at all. What is complicated is the upfront admission fee of R4000 they want by the fifteenth of August, before it even comes off next year’s school fees. So while I am celebrating with her, I am also quietly scrambling to work out where that money is going to come from. Belief does not pay admission fees either. I am completely honest about that tension, because pretending it is not there would undo everything I have tried to be truthful about in this series. I do not know what I am going to do if something does not land soon. I do not have that answer sitting ready, and I am not going to invent one for the sake of a tidy paragraph.

I have people around me right now, and I have been leaning into that support in a way that does not come naturally to me. I am someone who tries to solve her own problems quietly and alone. But even with people showing up for me the way they have, I know none of them can fix this. Not entirely. At the end of the day, this is mine to face, mine to work through, mine to keep fighting for. I think that is actually the part I am starting to hold onto. Not the fear of how long it is taking, but the version of myself I am becoming by having to fight for it.

I recorded a video this week that goes into more of what this last month and a half has actually looked like. The applications, the interviews, the parts that are still open and unresolved. I have put it below because some of this needed saying out loud rather than written down.

I do not know when this ends. I do not know what the other side of it looks like yet. What I do know is that coming out the other side of this, whatever that ends up meaning, is the part that excites me more than almost anything else right now. Not because I have figured out how to get there. I have not. But I am starting to trust that I will, even on the days I cannot see it yet.