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Yep. I had a two-year unemployment spell from 2010 to 2012. I applied to tons of jobs, and I got a bunch of interviews, but all of them rejected me until that very last interview at the end. And when I did get a job at the very end, it ended up being with a very young startup that never stopped having serious problems until I left them at the end of 2014 [0]. I was... not in a good state. Halfway through those two years, I had a nervous breakdown where I alienated a lot of people and lost some friends. It set my gender transition back by three years (I didn't even start thinking about it again until a year and a half after I was employed again). I thought about ending it multiple times. In fact, when I finally got my job after two years of unemployment... the day after I accepted the offer (the day of my in-person interview, I was given the offer and immediately accepted it) was the day I found out that my extended unemployment benefits had reached their end. If I didn't get that job, I wouldn't have been able to make rent at the end of the month, and I can guarantee that I would've killed myself rather than become homeless. It also fucked up my emotional state so much that I stuck with my next job longer than I should have, that I made myself accept the downright abusive way my employer treated me, because my two years of unemployment made me feel so worthless that I felt like I didn't deserve a better job than the one I had. In fact, I believed I was truly stuck with that job, that it would never be possible to get something better. It took years for me to break out of that and actually find something better. It wasn't until after I left that I realized I was in the same mental state as a victim in an abusive relationship. [0] Moving this to the end because it's long and ranty, but I need to get this off my chest. These serious problems include: being paid barely enough to stay afloat, no health insurance, no equity even for early employees, a verbally abusive boss who handled stress by taking it out on his employees, technical managers who made awful decisions because they had no management experience, a non-technical owner/CEO who refused to seek VC because he wanted to keep control so he had us constantly demo our product to rinky-dink angel investors over and over, an office in a building run by utterly terrible property managers (I have horror stories...), and management too cowardly to stand up for me when the property managers decided to discriminate against me for being transgender (I had to get the city involved, I did all the legwork myself, and I won despite our bumbling CEO almost accidentally sabotaging my case). I lived with all of this for almost three years because I honestly believed I was so broken that I didn't deserve a job at a company that wasn't abusive. |