Confession: I spent all of 2019 searching for a new job. I recently tweeted about this, about how exhausting and demoralizing the year was. How it was one of the most difficult years of my career; and how now, just two months shy of my one-year anniversary as a freelancer, I was having a full circle moment — so grateful I didn’t land any of the roles I was up for that year.

The start of 2019 opened with a watershed moment for me. After nearly six years of feeling like I had hit the career jackpot, I was falling deeply and madly out of love with a role that once upon a time had been a dream come true. Smack in the middle of a conference call that left me feeling completely blindsided, I knew it was time to move on.

I started by reaching out to my safe network, the contacts I could trust to keep my job search confidential. I polished up my LinkedIn profile and made searching for open roles my part-time gig. I created multiple resumes and wrote cover letters that I refined over and over again. I wanted more satisfaction from my daily work day. I wanted to work with people I respected who valued my efforts as much as I valued their leadership. This was before the pandemic, but even then I wanted a remote position, or at least the flexibility to work from my home office throughout the week after working remotely since 2013. Of course, I wanted more money. I had high hopes, but also a solid body of work to support those hopes.

It was slow going at the beginning, but that only made me try harder. I reached out to people and companies I wanted to work for even though they weren’t hiring. I invested in a LinkedIn Premium account and set up job alerts so I that I could get my application across the finish line as early as possible. Immediately after submitting my resume, I would use my reporting skills to figure out who the role reported to and sent personal cover letters, letting the hiring manager know that “While I have followed protocol and submitted my application via your job site, I wanted to reach out directly” emphasizing how excited I was at the opportunity to be part of their team.

I had an excel spread sheet tracking my job search efforts. I bought book after book offering career guidance and empowerment for women of a certain age desperately trying to find a certain kind of career. I started a career search support group with three other women who were also on the job hunt. We met for coffee on weekends to keep each other motivated and shared emails through the week with all of our wins and losses, using subject lines like, “Good news, anyone???”

An email from me to the group on April 17, 2019 read, “I’m trying to stay positive and also trying to figure out what — more than my job — has me in such a place of struggle. I mean, I definitely want a new role, but I fear my level of unhappiness isn’t so much about my job, but something deeper that has now manifested in career angst.” Three months into trying to find a new role — while doing my damnedest to be productive in a job that left me feeling like every day was a struggle to stay above water — my anxiety had reached a level that necessitated professional help. Shortly after sending that email to the group, I went back to therapy.

“I’m trying to stay positive and also trying to figure out what — more than my job — has me in such a place of struggle. I mean, I definitely want a new role, but I fear my level of unhappiness isn’t so much about my job, but something deeper that has now manifested in career angst.”

My job search wasn’t a complete failure. I was getting interviews. First interviews with recruiters that led to follow up interviews with hiring managers. Once I was flown to Boston for a full day of interviews for a role I thought for sure was mine for the taking, the hiring manager offering me his personal mobile number at the end of the day. “In case you think of any questions for me on the flight home,” he said right before I stepped into the elevator and headed back to the airport. I waited two days for a job offer that never came.

Halfway through the interview process for a job I thought I wanted more than anything, the recruiter reached out to ask if I could jump on a quick call. They had decided to make the role a “more junior” position and dropped the salary we had already discussed by more than $20,000. The recruiter wanted to know if I was still interested. I ended up pulling myself from consideration for that role because I had finally, finally after six months of applications and cover letters and phone interviews and all the heartaches and headaches that come with searching for a new job, received an offer from another company.

The cosmic joke was on me: It wasn’t an official offer and the hiring manager left the company before the HR department had a chance to officially add me to their roster of 1,000+ employees. I felt like I was on Candid Camera: only it was a distorted, career-themed version of the show that pulled the carpet out from under unsuspecting job applicants at the very moment they thought they had safely landed.

I kept meeting with my therapist every week. I had heartfelt one-on-ones with women I trusted, admired and loved. I meditated in the morning and went on long walks during the weekend. I read books by Pema Chodron and considered how to be happy even if I was in the same job for the rest of my life. Through it all, I couldn’t shake feeling desperately and hopelessly stuck. At the end of the year, after an interview where I was, again, flown across the country to meet the team in person only to be offered a freelance project, I decided I couldn’t keep up the brutal and excruciating self-flagellation that had become my job search.

I cancelled my LinkedIn Premium account and turned off job search alerts. I quit scrolling through job listing sites and company career pages. I ate ridiculous amounts of Private Selection Denali Extreme Moose Tracks ice cream sold by our local grocery. I kept reading books on empowerment and browsing the self-help titles at my local independent bookstore. I questioned whether my career opportunities — or lack thereof — was impacted by the fact that I was a 45+ year old woman who had stopped dyeing her gray roots.

The previous year, I had published a column on Salon.com about women who had decided to fully embrace their gray hair and how I was considering doing the same. In the piece, a year before I began looking for a new role, I shared my fears about going gray: “Will I become invisible? Not taken seriously — not taken at all? And what about work? What if I lose my job — will having gray hair make me less desirable professionally?” The line I had written more than a year before kept creeping back into my daily, recurring thoughts.

Finally, in January of 2020, one year after I decided to make a career change, I made a bold move and hired a career coach to begin exploring the possibility of going freelance.

A lot has happened since that first meeting with my career coach. In many, many ways the world has been completely upended on a global scale. I eventually did quit my job to begin a freelance career. It is, without question, my finest career move yet. All the things I wanted from a new role, I now have. Clients I love. Work that I find both inspiring and satisfying. More money.

Looking back, I can now see the arc of my career disenchantment and how it was part of a more profound, deeper existential need to move forward. The times I was struggling to stay afloat. The job offers that never happened. The bitter resentment I kept sucking on like an Altoids mint that wouldn’t disintegrate. Each of these moments were part of the process and I am grateful for every single event that brought me to where I am — sitting here at my dining room table on a sunny Tuesday afternoon writing for my own creative purposes, spending my day exactly how I please. From my relatively new vantage point, it’s impossible not to look back on 2019 with gratitude, so very thankful no one hired me.

I started this post with a confession. Here’s another: Part of my decision to go freelance was motivated by the desire to spend more time writing and sharing my own stories. I’ve kept a diary since I first learned how to write. Publishing a diary made up of all the stories that go into the interior life of a working woman feels very much at home to me. I find myself buying memoir after memoir written by women of a certain age, as if I am starving for more stories that reflect the woman — and professional — I am trying to become.

Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I first bought the URL for this blog six months ago, and while this isn’t a book (yet), I am finally following Morrison’s words of wisdom.

Welcome to my diary.