Hunter (How It Feels)

I've been unemployed and living in Ireland for just over a month. I thought my years of experience getting an award-winning national magazine to cruising altitude would help my chances in the job market abroad. I thought to myself, 'At least I'm not fresh out of school trying to find work, I have experience, I have accomplishments to show. It'll only be a matter of time before I find something, anything.'

I still don't have any solid prospects, which isn't exactly a bewildering predicament. Ireland is in recession and, at this point, employers are so skittish, an unexpected loud noise would send them crawling frantically up a telephone pole. But, if you don't have a bunch of money in savings, you have to get creative in making the cross-Atlantic leap. Also, international job-hunting from the U.S. felt like an exercise in trying to wring milk from a hunk of crumbling driftwood. In all my 29 years, I have never heard such deafening, stultifying radio silence. You have no idea.

So I moved over ahead of Summer to look for a job. She stayed behind so our family would have at least one paycheck to sustain us during the interim period. That approach seemed like the only sensible way to make the transition work—Tarzan taking one hand off his swinging vine and not releasing the other until he had a firm grasp on the next vine. We didn't have any illusions about the Irish job market being an easy nut to crack, and it hasn't been. But the distance has been hardest of all. Before this separation, we'd only been apart a week. It's hard to go from sleeping in the same bed to being Skype buddies and pen pals. But this is the price we both agreed to pay in order to coax our Ireland dream into reality.

My job-hunting has thus far offered me quite an education in management—guilt management. Guilt for leaving Summer behind and experiencing so many momentous occasions without her (we'll definitely still be apart when I turn 30 in late April). Guilt for voluntarily quitting a good job—a dream job—when so many others would be happy to have any job. Guilt that I'm not doing enough to find a job here, even though I'm chasing every relevant opportunity that I come across in town and during my daily job-board perusing.

Maybe I'm not being aggressive enough in my follow-up. Maybe I'm being too aggressive in my follow-up and scaring employers away. I told someone the other day that job-hunting feels like dating—the anxious searching, the compatibility judgments, the interviews, the hoping, the waiting game, culminating in some kind of legal contract that demonstrates the commitment of both parties. Only thing is: I can't adequately express in words how much I hated the dating game with its murky rules and 'wait three days before calling' tomfoolery. Now I feel like I'm doing it again. 'I've already sent in my CV. Will I look too desperate if I call to see if they received it? Maybe I should wait three days or something.'

The best thing about this process has been the way it's forced me to reassess my own humility. Working as an editor for Paste had wonderful perks—paid travel, hanging out with Scarlett Johansson and Jack White, attending music/film/video game conferences and festivals, playing gatekeeper to aspiring writers, TV & radio interviews, etc.—but it eventually takes over your self-concept, crowding out all the deep-down parts that are so much more fundamental to being who you are.

I never want my job to be the most compelling, important aspect of who I am. If the TGI Friday's on Grafton Street likes the CV I delivered and calls me back today, offering me a serving job, I'll say 'yes of course thank you yes please,' I'll even wear the dorky suspenders and flair buttons (Dublin hasn't switched to black polos). It would be a pride-swallowing moment, to be sure, but how wonderful to be sending down one more scrawny root into the Irish soil.