Maybe it was my age.
Maybe it was my résumé.
Maybe it was the fact that I'd spent nearly three decades working in education and apparently had developed no transferable skills whatsoever.
Maybe it was my very public, very bad mistake.
Maybe it was the felony attached to it.
Maybe it was Google.
Google and I were not friends.
Whatever the reason, over nineteen months, I applied for more than one thousand jobs.
One.
Thousand.
That's not unemployment. That's a subscription.
At some point, I became convinced Indeed had assigned an employee specifically to me.
“Mike applied again.”
“Where?”
“Costco.”
“Didn't Costco reject him already?”
“Three times.”
“Okay. Send the email.”
I applied everywhere.
Walmart.
Target.
Costco.
Trader Joe's.
Home Depot.
Lowe's.
7-Eleven.
Dollar Tree.
Wegmans.
I aggressively pursued bananas at Wegmans. Bananas rejected me.
Do you know what that does to a man's self-esteem?
I spent almost thirty years leading school districts and apparently was not qualified to rotate produce.
I applied to sell vitamins.
Which felt unnecessarily cruel because, by then, I clearly needed something stronger than Vitamin D.
I offered to wipe down shopping carts.
Move lumber.
Stock shelves.
Make sandwiches.
Clean bathrooms.
Work overnight.
I applied to be a laundry attendant.
Because apparently when life puts you through the wringer, the logical next step is to apply to operate one.
I applied to pick up garbage.
Landscape lawns.
Work in bakeries.
Sell cookies.
I was prepared to frost things.
At fifty-five years old, with a doctorate.
Give me the piping bag.
I will make the cupcake beautiful.
And then… cemeteries.
Two of them.
I remember thinking: "Okay, God. I see what You're doing here. If nobody among the living will hire me, perhaps this is my demographic."
Nope.
Rejected.
By a cemetery.
Twice.
There is ghosting. And then there is being ghosted by people whose primary clientele are already ghosts.
That's advanced ghosting.
I applied to churches.
Catholic organizations. Charities. Even a seminary.
Because surely God had an opening.
Nothing. Apparently Heaven was fully staffed.
And somewhere during those nineteen months, the whole thing stopped being funny.
Because rejection is funny for a while.
You joke about it.
You tell people you're “exploring opportunities.”
That's professional language for:
Please, for the love of God, somebody let me work.
Then you stop telling people about the applications.
Because they're going to ask.
“Did you hear anything?”
No.
“How about that interview?”
Nothing.
“What happened with that job?”
They went with someone else.
Again.
Sometimes I interviewed and never heard another word.
Sometimes I made it through multiple interviews.
A few times, I got the job. Or thought I did.
“We'd love to have you.”
Finally.
Then came the background check.
And suddenly… they wouldn't love to have me.
The offer disappeared.
What made those moments especially painful was that I had told them everything beforehand.
Everything.
My accident. My conviction. My record.
My very public fall from a career I'd spent most of my adult life building.
Full disclosure. I wasn't hiding anything. I couldn't.
Google had apparently taken over that department.
Still, I'd watch people's perception of me change.
Before the background check: "Impressive experience."
After the background check: "Thank you for your interest."
That's a long fall in four business days.
And I understand it. I really do.
People have choices.
Organizations have reputations.
Actions have consequences.
Mine certainly did.
But knowing that doesn't make rejection hurt less.
Especially when it happens again. And again. And again.
I had worked since I was fifteen. I was fifty-five.
Forty years of getting up and going somewhere.
And suddenly… nowhere.
That's the part of unemployment I never understood until I lived it.
You think it's about money. And God knows, it's about money.
But eventually you realize it's about something else too. Being needed.
Someone expecting you. Someone noticing whether you show up.
Having somewhere you're supposed to be on Tuesday morning.
We talk a lot about losing jobs. We don't talk enough about what happens when a person starts losing pieces of himself with them.
The title? You can live without it.
The office? Definitely.
The salary? Painful, but survivable.
But the quiet? The quiet is different.
The quiet starts asking questions...
Are you still useful?
Does anybody need you anymore?
Did the worst thing you ever did become the only thing people will ever see?
And after nineteen months…
I was tired.
Not tired like I needed a nap.
Tired like I didn't know how many more times I could convince myself tomorrow would be different.
My counselor knew.
One day he said: “I know a place.”
It was a residential treatment program for people struggling with drug and alcohol dependence.
They needed someone to work directly with the residents.
Support them. Listen to them. Help them through the ordinary messiness of trying to rebuild a life.
Would I interview?
At that point?
Sir. I had applied to dig holes in cemeteries. I was available.
So I interviewed.
And then something strange happened.
They asked about my past.
I told them. The accident. The conviction. The record. The fall.
The parts of my résumé that don't fit neatly beneath PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE.
And I waited for the familiar shift.
You learn to recognize it. That little change in someone's face when your story moves from: “Tell us about yourself”...
to: “Oh.”
But it didn't happen. They kept listening.
And for the first time in nineteen months, the parts of my story that had been closing doors… opened one.
My background wasn't something they had to overlook. It was something they understood. Maybe even something they could use.
I knew what shame felt like. I knew what it was like to disappoint people. I knew what it was like to have strangers decide who you are from the worst thing you've done.
I knew what it was like to sit in rooms you never imagined you'd be sitting in. I knew what it was like to wonder whether your life could ever become something good again.
Turns out… those were transferable skills.
They hired me. Just like that.
No disappearing. No rescinded offer. No polite email three days later. No judgment.
Welcome aboard. We want you here. We think you can help.
I had forgotten how beautiful it feels to be wanted somewhere.
After nineteen months…
I had a job. A real job. With benefits. For my family.
I work directly with people now.
Boots on the ground. No corner office. No impressive title. No big salary.
I listen. I encourage. I sit with people on difficult days. I help where I can.
Sometimes I simply remind someone that tomorrow is still coming.
And here's the ridiculous part...
I used to make about six times more money. Six times. But I think I'm ten times happier.
I realize that math would have gotten me fired from a school district. But stay with me...
For most of my career, I thought success moved upward.
More responsibility. More influence. More money. Bigger title. Bigger office.
Up.
Up.
Up.
Nobody tells you that sometimes life takes you down.
Way down.
Past the office. Past the title. Past the reputation. Past the version of yourself you worked very hard to become.
Until eventually there isn't much left except… you.
And strangely enough, that's where I found something I had been looking for all along.
Purpose. Not the kind you put in a biography. The kind you feel when someone sitting across from you says: “I screwed up my life.”
And you can say: “Yeah. Me too.”
And they look at you differently.
Because you aren't speaking from a textbook.
You aren't giving them a quote you found on Instagram. You know.
That's when I finally understood something about those nineteen months.
I thought my record made me less useful. Here… it makes me more useful.
I thought my worst chapter had disqualified me from the rest of the book.
Here… somebody handed me a pen.
So if you're reading this from the middle of your own mess…
If the emails aren't coming. If the interviews aren't working.
If you've made a mistake you can't undo. If your life looks absolutely nothing like the life you planned.
If you're embarrassed by where you are.
I won't tell you everything happens for a reason. I don't know that...
Actually. (I think I do but that's a future essay...)
And when you're hurting, sometimes that sentence makes you want to throw something.
I will tell you what I know...
Keep going.
Not because the next application will definitely work.
Mine didn't. Neither did the one after that.
Keep going because you cannot see yet what your life is preparing you to understand.
Sometimes experience doesn't look like a credential. Sometimes it looks like a scar.
Sometimes the thing you are most ashamed of becomes the very thing that allows you to sit beside another human being and say: “I know.”
I applied for more than one thousand jobs.
For nineteen months, I kept asking God to open a door.
Any door.
Walmart.
A church.
A bakery.
A cemetery.
Seriously, Lord. The cemetery?
And I kept asking: "Why won't You open one?"
And now I wonder if God wasn't ignoring me at all.
Maybe He was listening. Maybe the answer just didn't look anything like the life I kept asking Him to give back. Because I was begging God to make me useful again.
And all that time…
He was teaching me how to be useful to people I hadn't met yet.
I thought I needed my old life back.
I don't.
I needed a life where the person I had become could matter.
One thousand applications.
Nineteen months.
One open door.
And the strangest thing happened when I finally walked through it.
I stopped asking God why He had closed all the others.
Because maybe the worst thing that ever happened to me didn't end my usefulness.
Maybe… it gave me someone to be useful to.
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