Head Up! Smile! Unemployment on the Horizon!
I’m sitting in my office, a closet-like space tucked away from the rest of the Creative Writing department. Two desks fill most of the room. My office-mate sits closer to the door, their desk covered in an assortment of graded assignments and personal things, a small territory marked out. Mine holds a computer I’ve spent too many hours staring at and nothing else. In the corner, a table hosts an ongoing chess match between us, pieces frozen mid-game, waiting for one of us to make the next move. A broken chair sits tucked under it, uncomfortable and never really used by anyone.
Two shelves line the wall, mostly empty now. I took my books home before Spring Break a few weeks ago, preparing for an ending I saw coming months ago. The bare shelves make the space feel temporary in a way it didn’t before, like a room already forgetting who lived in it. All that’s left is waiting for the chess game to finish, so it too may find its way back home.
Soon, I am back to where I was in May 2025: unemployed. It is a bittersweet moment. Months ago, I made the bold declaration I would give up teaching and, well, I have to now. I received no invitation back for the Fall Semester. The applications I’ve sent out over the last few weeks have returned nothing but silence. Resigned to fate, I expect copious free time ahead. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I have a clearer picture of what I want to do with that free time. Write. Stream. Repeat until I magically get a job.
Or, at least, that’s the plan.
Truthfully, I am not quite as confident as I seem. The bravado of declaring I’d walk away from teaching looks a lot different when unemployment is no longer hypothetical but a date on the calendar. I worry I’ll never find a job again, that the skills I’ve gathered over the years don’t quite add up to anything a hiring manager would recognize on paper. Or an AI would flag as beneficial. While I dream of making a living off my writing and content creation, I realize that path isn’t viable, at least not yet, and probably not soon enough to matter.
As far as jobs go, I’m not sure what I could do other than teaching. I have skills I’ve developed along the way: leadership from being in the classroom, general writing and editing from these posts and Patreon endeavors, video and audio work from streaming, and a past career in theatre that feels further away with every passing year. They’re actual skills, honestly earned, but scattered in a way that makes them hard to package. How do you write a résumé that says, “I can do a little of everything but haven’t done most of it, or any of it, professionally in years”? How do you convince someone you’re worth taking a chance on when the confidence you project on a blog doesn’t always follow you into an interview room?
I don’t have an answer to any of that.
This is all on me, of course. Part of coping my lack of answers is writing it out, putting all my insecurity somewhere outside of my head so it stops rattling around. There’s something clarifying about naming the fear instead of letting it sit in the dark and grow into something unmanageable. Granted, even letting it out doesn’t mean it disappears. I’ll still agonize over it for the days and weeks to come, turning the same worries over in my mind like a puzzle that may have no clean solution. But at least here, on the virtual page of my silly website, it has a life. And I can remind myself in the future of how much I’ve grown in the years.
I’m sure future employers will see this, and if they do, well, at least they’ll know what they’re getting: someone honest about his uncertainty, still figuring it out, but willing to learn and grow. Someone who has stumbled plenty and kept moving. And if they can’t see the value in that, it’s their loss.
All I can do now, as I continue to prepare for my eventual unemployment, is keep my head up, smile, and pursue the things that keep me sane. There are two weeks left of this office.
After that, I have writing, streaming, and my pups to distract me. And I’m excited by that even if the dread of my future lingers in the back of my mind.
Jesús M. Rivera 