Member-only story
I Knew 2020 Was Going to Be a Rough Year for My Career. I Had No Idea How Bad.
I applied for over 100 jobs and dealt with a surprise lawsuit while grappling with a pandemic
Just over a year ago, I was sequestered inside my apartment, barely leaving if I could help it. In late February 2020, the pandemic hadn’t yet become a terrifying reality in Brooklyn, where I live, but the thought of opening my front door filled me with an all-consuming, existential dread. I had already put myself into lockdown mode.
For a number of reasons (but many of them career-adjacent), I’d already made up my mind that 2020 would be a lost year. My contract at the New York Times had just ended and finding another journalism job was proving difficult. An editor for a new media website asked me to meet him for coffee in SoHo and never showed up. A tech company looking to staff up an editorial team had me come in for at least half a dozen job interviews and an edit test. I was so confident it was mine to lose that I finally talked myself into saying yes to said job at Major Tech Company, if offered, even though I didn’t feel very good about it. But at the last minute they decided to “move in a different direction.” Another website asked me to do a time-consuming edit test and interview with their editor-in-chief, who then ghosted me for several months.
On and on it went. I soon grew very tired of this cat-and-mouse game, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I widened my search and ended up applying for more than 100 jobs in and out of journalism. I could freelance full-time, but I’d already decided it just wasn’t for me, especially when I was doing it from a place of desperation and financial precarity. Meanwhile, I watched helplessly as my paltry checking account balance dwindled.
But this wasn’t the entire reason leaving my apartment made me so anxious. In early 2019 I’d started, and ultimately decided to leave, a job helping to relaunch a news website. I was upset that a job I’d been so thrilled about didn’t end up working out. Time passed. Then, in January 2020, I received a letter of intent to sue on grounds of defamation related to how I left that job and spoke about it afterward on social media and in the press.
