You know that saying you don't know how good you've got it until it's gone?
And you know how no matter how many times you can be grateful for something in your life, when it's gone you think...I could have embraced it just a little bit more?
That feeling is surrounding us right now. There is so much loss happening in the world that sometimes it feels like we're never going to recover from this.
When corona first hit, I'm not too proud to admit that I didn't take it very seriously. Of course, it was devastating to hear about the affect it was having, but I never thought it would spread across the world as rapidly as it did. I never believed it would affect as many lives as it has.
So I sat at my desk at work and talked about it with my coworkers, ignorant to where I would be in just a couple of weeks time, let alone a couple of months.
First, like so many across the UK, I was sent to work from home. I packed up some things from work one night and headed home, wondering which room of the house I'd get the best signal for video calling. (The answer was that none of them were very good).
And then the government announced their furlough scheme and, surprising to no one at the company, a bunch of us were put on furlough for the foreseeable future.
Furlough isn't too bad, for anyone wondering. It's a bit weird, that's for sure, but you're being financially supported without necessarily having to do anything at all. It felt a bit like university; I'd write, I'd read, and occasionally I'd answer an email from work from someone who couldn't find one of my files.
But then I got an e-invitation to a meeting labelled "Full staff briefing - The way forward".
Believe it or not, this invite made me very anxious. For one, it was very ambiguous - what was the way forward? Was this going to be happy news or not? Surely they're not going to announce redundancies in front of all the other staff? No, of course they're not, that would be insensitive.
At least, that was the journey my thoughts followed (repeatedly) after getting the email.
I was wrong, of course. Not about it being an insensitive way to conduct business (10 points to Hufflepuff for that one). I was wrong in presuming they wouldn't use an full staff briefing as a way to announce they were making a quarter of the staff redundant, including me.
The weird thing is, before all of this happened, I was looking for another job. I didn't enjoy the culture where I worked and I wanted to leave. But having a job you don't enjoy whilst searching for something else and finding a job after being made redundant during a global pandemic are two radically different positions to be in.
And I'm not sure it has sunk in yet.
Because I think I should be scared. I think I should be worried about the (lack of) opportunities out there, the reality of finding a job in this climate.
And I'm not.
I just don't care as much as last time I was unemployed and seeking work.
This has been playing on my mind for a little while and I've narrowed it down to two main reasons.
The first is that I'm more confident in my abilities. I got a job first time round without much experience. Now that I've more or less doubled my portfolio, I genuinely believe it will be easier to find work. Other people saw worth in my work, reassuring me that even if I don't always know what I'm doing I have the ability to learn quickly and adapt my skills.
The second is that I know what I want now. I know the kind of position I'm looking for, the culture that would suit me, and I have a better understanding of how I work in a real office environment (i.e. not just a university library).
Combined, these things give me such peace of mind when it comes to Job Search 2.0
That's not to say it's going to be easy, or that my next job will be perfect. I may end up being somewhere very different to what I first envisioned. But it's also not going to be impossible. And right now, that's all I need to know.
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