Still Finding Your Footing
What Happens After the Job Search Ends
When my job disappeared, I did not have a plan. I had a text from a friend: download your performance reviews. It was a small starting point in a year that would ask much more of me.
Within the first 24-48 hours of my position being eliminated, a close friend from college reached out with that advice. She had been through a sudden layoff herself, and understood the disorientation firsthand. It sounds simple, but it helped me start reworking my resume, and reminded me of challenges I had navigated and pivots I had made. I was lucky to have had a supervisor who invested time in useful, specific feedback. Reading those reviews reminded me that what had felt routine was often anything but.
The Role I thought I Would Never Leave
My role that ended with the closing of USAID was my dream job, I have no doubt about that. For six years I worked in humanitarian and international development at Sesame Workshop, coordinating and managing partners implementing programming in Early Childhood Development, Mutual Respect and Understanding, and Water Sanitation and Hygiene. I learned so much about project development throughout those years, even getting to interact with Muppets as new characters were built for new audiences and new contexts. Toward the end of my time there, that work expanded into Ahlan Simsim Iraq, a USAID-funded continuation of our original MacArthur Foundation partnership, later mischaracterized by some as wasteful spending on a TV show. It was not. I loved nearly all of it.
But I have to admit, and probably knew even then, that I was experiencing that role with rose-colored glasses. I was ignorant to elements of the company and even some of our program models that could have set us up for longer term success. And in those six years I neglected to keep learning and networking outside of my position. I didn’t think strategically about positioning myself for future opportunities, or pause to ask myself which parts of the work I most enjoyed, even if the answer was almost always “all of them.” All things I had to scramble to do when the rug was pulled out from under me.
What I Realized and Rebuilt
I am working diligently against that now. On a semi-regular basis I capture reflections of my work: what I worked on, what I led or supported, the intended outcome, and what I learned. I aim for weekly but have averaged closer to bi-weekly. I keep a journal where I jot down one or two sentences as they come to me, the kind of details that would otherwise vanish by the time I needed them on a resume. I am also currently volunteering in contract, compliance, and grant management to stay connected to the international development space and keep my skills sharp.
What followed was a year I was not prepared for, even though I had anticipated it. I knew going in that the job market was tough and that it could realistically be a full year before I was working again. Knowing that didn’t make it easier. Over 250 applications. Cover letters written on days when the last thing I wanted to do was sell myself. Interview processes running in tandem until burnout quietly made decisions for me and I began withdrawing from processes I could not fully show up for.
The Year of Searching
The cruel irony of a long job search is that the moment you finally allow yourself to rest, everything moves at once. It was during a trip where I had anticipated taking a real break from it all that interviews started rolling in. By the time I accepted a position I was actively in the running for four roles. It was a considered choice made by a very tired person. The role offered genuine learning opportunities even though it moved me into a new sector and a different pace than I was used to. I was drawn to the chance to understand how data truly supports strategy, something I had only ever been on the periphery of. I found myself unexpectedly interested in donor stewardship, thinking of it as another arm of the stakeholder and partner engagement I had always gravitated toward. And for the first time I was officially stepping into supervising a small team, something I am approaching with both care and humility.
The role I stepped into is still relatively new within the organization, only about two years old. In another season of my life that might have felt unsettling. But nearly every role I have held has involved building something, a new team, a new project, a position that hadn’t yet found its full shape. I know how to work in that kind of open space, even when it is uncomfortable.
For those leaving the international development space in particular, your new role may come at a slower pace. That slower pace is in many ways a luxury. It can also be quietly unnerving when you are used to an environment that often felt like managing several emergencies at once. What I am still learning is how to be grateful for the slower days and to use that time to go deeper rather than wider.
Our Mission: Getting You Back On Your Feet
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What a Team Shows you Early
Early into starting, I experienced a significant loss in my family. What met me was immediate and unconditional. Take whatever time you need. It was the kind of response that tells you something true about a team before you have had time to fully learn who they are. I had sensed it during the interview process, something in how people spoke to each other and about their work. That instinct, it turned out, was worth trusting.
And then, in the steadiness of a new routine, the grief I had been outrunning for more than a year finally caught up with me.
You cannot mourn a career you loved while simultaneously crafting the pitch for your next one. So you don’t. You keep moving because stopping feels like sinking. Survival mode is efficient that way. What it doesn’t do is make space for everything you are carrying.
That space comes later, and often catches you off guard. The stability you fought so hard to rebuild turns out to be exactly what grief needed to finally arrive. It doesn’t announce itself cleanly. It surfaces in quiet moments, in the stillness that follows months of constant motion.
What the Next Chapter Asks of You
If you are somewhere in this process, still searching, newly landed, or somewhere in between, I don’t think the offer letter is the finish line your nervous system thinks it is. It closes one chapter and opens another, and that second chapter asks something different of you. At least that has been my experience. It asked me to finally feel what I didn’t have room to feel before.
Be patient with that. Or at least I am trying to be. It is not a sign that you made the wrong choice. It is not ingratitude. It is what it looks like when you have been holding something heavy for a long time and you finally find somewhere safe to set it down.
Pay attention too to the signals people give you before you need them. The team that shows up for you on your worst day often showed you exactly who they were from the very beginning. I am trying to trust that.
Connect with Marina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/magabriel/
Are you interested in sharing something with the Career Pivot Community? Reach out to careerpivotteam@skillmonkeycoaching.com
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Thank you. This really resonated for me: "You cannot mourn a career you loved while simultaneously crafting the pitch for your next one. So you don’t. You keep moving because stopping feels like sinking."
I'm not "there" yet... in fact, I fear "getting there" because what if that means I am so immersed in the new that I forget the network I loved working with for 30 years? But... one day at a time...
This is beautifully written, and completely on the spot. As a coach, I see this everyday. Even those in mission-driven work find that they paused their grieving, and that means it's hard to come fully online in their new role. Grief is non-linear and rather inconvenient!
Some find the pace slow, or not challenging enough. USAID work, inside and out of the Agency, was fast-paced and challenging in all the best (and the hardest) ways. We are both conditioned to this, and most of us sought this work because we thrive on challenge.
Now the challenge is to understand what is habit, and what is discomfort with reconnecting with our body, new colleagues and a new future and what is boredom or misalignment. It's a new leg of the journey and we can feel just as unprepared as we were for the first leg.
Thank you for sharing this!