Episode 10: Welcome to The Long Walk

This episode opens Phase 2 of Fear, Faith, and the Forest, called The Long Walk. It's for the people who didn't get out in the first 90 days, who've reached an equilibrium they know is conditional, who are still walking through the forest of long-term unemployment. Rich names what the job search actually feels like at this point, the zombie ritual of applying into the void, and what's worth doing about it. He talks about two summers compared, the household that's still alive even when the trip can't happen, the functional steadiness sitting on top of a possible cliff, and a quiet realization about what this period has been building all along. The verse is Hebrews 12:1.

Thank you for listening! 

Transcript

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Welcome back to Fear Faith in the Forest. I'm Rick Zapata, and I'm still an unemployed software engineering leader. Last episode, episode 9, closed out phase 1 of this podcast: Crisis and Stabilization. 9 episodes covering everything from the day you got laid off to the lessons learned after months of walking the path. If you haven't listened to episode 9 yet, I'd recommend going back. It's the bridge between where we've been and where we're going. This episode opens what comes next. Not a clean break, the path is still the same path, but the part of the walk we're on is different now, and the podcast is going to change shape to match it. Before we get into it, a quick word for anyone who just found this podcast or anyone who's early in their journey. If you're new, welcome. There are nine episodes before this one, and if you're in the early weeks of unemployment, those episodes might serve you better as a starting point. Go back to episode one and walk the path from the beginning. But if you've been at this for a while, like me, you can stay right here. Some of the people walking with me right now are probably right where you are. This isn't going to be a typical topic episode. There are no three action steps at the end. This is a reflection of what's been happening lately, what feelings have been surfacing, and why those feelings are pushing this show into a new phase. By the end of the episode, you'll know what this phase is called and who it's for. But one thing will remain consistent, and that is starting with today's verse. Today's verse is Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. I picked this verse because of one word in particular. Perseverance. The thing about perseverance is that you don't need it for a sprint. You don't need it for a 100-meter dash. You need it for a marathon. You need it for a race that's long enough that the strength you started with isn't going to be enough to finish. And that's where most of the people listening to this podcast actually live. The crisis was 90 days. The race is much longer than that. This verse isn't telling you to run faster, it's telling you to keep running. Throw off what's slowing you down. Don't get tangled up in the things that aren't the race. And keep going. That's the welcome to this phase. The race you're running is long. Perseverance is the work. I want to start by naming what the job search actually feels like in this period. When you're in the first 90 days, the search has urgency. Every application feels like it could be the one. You tailor the resume, you write a cover letter that actually a well-thought-out cover letter, you walk away from the submit button thinking maybe this is it. Maybe this is the one that breaks the streak. That feeling doesn't last forever. Months or even years in, the search starts to feel different. You still apply, and yes, you still tailor, you still sip, you still hit submit, and you still get excited for some of those positions. But there's a part of you that has done this so many times that the ritual and the feeling have changed. It's almost like you become a zombie about applying. You see the post, you know without even opening it, whether your background matches, and if you know that your resume contains a good portion of what it requires, you upload the resume. You fill in the same fields you filled out again and again. You check the gender, race, ethnicity, veteran status, and disability boxes, and you hit submit. And as you're doing it, somewhere in the back of your mind, you already know nothing is going to happen. Some of the applications excite you. Some you can do, but you don't get excited about. Some you're less enthusiastic about it, but you apply anyway because the runway is the runway. And every single one of them, exciting or not, leads to the same place, the void. So you keep going through the motions, you keep applying. But you're going through the motions of someone who has done this for too long to expect a different result. That is the search in the long walk. Now, I want to be fair about this because it's not just me and it's not just bad luck. First of all, a lot of people are going through this. The silence isn't personal. There are thousands of people out there hitting the same submit button, getting the same nothing back. You're not the only one being ignored. The system is ignoring a lot of people right now. Second, there aren't a lot of jobs out there. We spoke about this early on. We recognized this. We knew this was happening. The roles that get posted are getting flooded with applications. The roles that would have been mine three years ago are getting filled by people with even more experience than me, who lost their jobs the same way I lost mine. The math is brutal, and it's not about me. That doesn't make the zombie feeling go away, but it does change what the feeling means. It's not a verdict on you, it's a description of the market. Here's what I will say, and we're going to come back to this in a later episode. Going zombie at the application level is normal. It's a defense mechanism, but it's not a strategy. So I started to do something different. I'll save the full version of this conversation for episode 13 when we talk about alternatives, but the short version is this. I've stopped focusing on the big remote roles with at the big companies, and I started looking at the local, small, and medium-sized businesses that need someone like me. Companies where I can walk in and actually meet the person making the decision instead of disappearing into a database. We'll go deeper into what that pivot looks like, but for now just know when the search starts to feel like the same thing on repeat, that's a signal. Not to give up, but to change where you're applying. The zombie feeling tells you that the strategy isn't working anymore. And the fix is to change the strategy, not to keep zombie applying harder. Let me continue with something that's on my mind right now. We're heading into summer, and summer has a feeling to it that's different from any other time of the year. Last summer I was unemployed too, but the runway was longer back then. I had time, I had savings, I had margin, and I was determined to make it a great summer for my boys. The pool was open, their friends were over, the routine held. We even managed to get away. Yeah, a real trip with all of us. From the outside, you would not have known anything was amiss. This summer is the same situation with less margin. Everything fun has a budget now. Every decision has a number behind it. The trip we took last summer is probably not going to happen this year. Now, I'll say my family isn't big on summer travel anyway, because we have baseball tournaments most of the summer, so that's where the schedule goes. So we're not the kind of family that disappears for two weeks in July every year. But last summer we managed to get away. This summer, probably not. And here's the thing Instagram in June, July is brutal. You scroll and it's everybody's vacations. Everybody's beach photos, everybody's summer is here posts, you see it, and there's a small ache that comes with it. It's not jealousy. I'm not, I'm genuinely happy for the people I know who are getting away. It's just the awareness that you're sitting it out this year. And here's what keeps scrolling through my mind. Sitting out the travel doesn't mean sitting out the summer, because the house is alive. Now, I should be honest about what the house looks like in the summer. My kids are off from school, but they're not actually home as much as you'd think. My eldest with his job and his girlfriend and his friends in baseball doesn't spend a ton of time here in the house. And the little one is on and off with summer camp, so it's not like we're all stuck here under one roof for three months. But when they are home, when we're all here together, the energy is amazing. It's constant laughter, it's fun, it's jokes. Uh, my in fact, my my youngest son and I have a routine for waking up my older son in the morning. We blast into his room and we turn on a little portable speaker blasting peanut butter jelly time while dancing goofy dances. It's not a fun, it's not a song he's particularly fond of either. It's a song he's forced to react to, and then we all laugh about it. And my boys, you know, they scare each other in the hallway constantly, got jokes flying. Uh, we actually sit down the other day. We actually sat down to play a co-op video game together, and we did it for hours, and it was a ton of fun. So the energy in this house is not low, it's not grim, it's loud and it's silly, and it's good. Whatever is missing from this summer in terms of places isn't missing from this summer in terms of feeling. The fun is happening, it's just happening at home. And here's what I keep coming back to when the Instagram scroll hits. I think about my own childhood, and I cannot for the life of me remember the destinations. I can't tell you which trip was where, and I can't even tell you for sure how many trips we took, but I do remember the moments. I remember specific jokes that landed. I remember a moment where everyone was laughing so hard nobody could breathe. I remember the energy of being together. That's what stuck. Not the geography or the places, but the energy. And that's the lesson I'm inheriting from my childhood, and that's the lesson I'm trying to pass on to my boys. They're not going to remember whether we went to the beach this summer. They're going to remember the energy of the house. So that's what we're protecting this summer. Not the trip we can't take, but the energy we can. Now, I want to put a name to something. By any measurable standard, things in my life right now are working. The household is happy, the kids are okay, I have a contract that's bringing an income, the bills are paid, the routine is holding. If you looked at our life from the outside, you would say that family is doing fine. And every single piece of what I just described depends on a contract that could end at any time. I don't think it will. The work is going well, client is happy, the relationship is strong, but it could. That's what equilibrium actually means in this period. It's not stable the way employment was stable. Employment was stable because the company was around me and the benefits were lined up and the paycheck came every two weeks like clockwork. That kind of stable doesn't exist for me right now. What I have is functional steadiness sitting on top of a possible cliff. The calm is conditional, not earned. The peace is real, but it's borrowed. And I think this is one of the most important things to name out loud for anyone listening to this. Because if you've been at this for a while, you have your own version of what I just described. Maybe yours is severance that's running out. Maybe it's savings that are stretched thin. Maybe it's a side gig that keeps the lights on. Maybe it's a partner whose income is covering the gap. Whatever's holding you up right now is probably also conditional. And it could change. And if it does, the math gets hard fast. That's the equilibrium act. You're standing on something that's working and you know what's underneath it. Now, here's the part that matters. The cliff is real. I'm not just gonna pretend it isn't. I'm not gonna tell you to just have faith and not worry. The cliff exists. But you can't let the cliff define your day. If you let the cliff, if I let the cliff define my day, I wouldn't make breakfast, I wouldn't drive my kids to practice, I wouldn't do the contract work, I wouldn't apply for jobs, I wouldn't walk, I wouldn't record this podcast. I would just sit in the awareness of the cliff and let it eat me. That's not living, that's bracing. So the dis the discipline of this equilibrium is this you acknowledge the cliff. You don't pretend it's not there, but you don't let it run your daily life either. You do the things that need to get done. You stay present with the people you love, and you walk the path. The cliff exists and the walk continues. I want to tell you something I noticed recently. It's a small thing, but it landed bigger than I expected. Somewhere in the months of of us running lean, I realized our household is operating on a much lower number than it used to. Bills are paid, kids are closed and fed, baseball is still happening, the lights are on, and we're all and we're doing it all at a fraction of what it used to take. The first time that observation actually clicked for me, I sat with it for a while. Because here's what that means. If I landed the same role I had before at the same salary I was making before, the financial recovery wouldn't be a slow climb back to where we were. It would be a sprint. I could probably save a significant portion of every paycheck. We've gotten so efficient at running this house that returning to the old income would feel like a windfall. That's not a small thing. And it made me think back to the mantra from episode one. This is the path God wants me to walk, so I will walk it. I've said that to myself through every rejection, every tight month, every dip into the retirement fund, and I've understood it mostly as something to hold on to when things were hard. A thing you say when you don't have the answers. But sitting with this realization, I started to wonder if maybe part of what this period has been doing, kind of quietly in the background, while I was busy applying and prepping and grinding, is teaching the family to live on less. I don't say that to make it sound noble. It isn't noble. It's just leaner. And the leanness wasn't something I planned. It happened because it had to. Maybe walking this path was for that. Not as the only reason, not as a reason I could prove, but as a possibility. Maybe the leaner household isn't only a consequence of unemployment. Maybe it's part of what the walk was for. Now, here's what the realization doesn't mean. It doesn't replace the need for a job. The job still has to come. The optimization is meaningful, but it's not the finish line. The finish line is when the income returns, and then the optimization becomes a runway extender for whatever comes next. But here's another thing. This period hasn't just been waiting, it's been building quietly, in ways you only notice when you stop and look back at what you've actually done. That's worth naming. Because if you're listening to this and feeling like the past several months have been wasted, they haven't. You've been building something. You may not see it yet, but it's there. So let me pull back to the podcast itself for a second. Episode nine was a reflection on what held up from phase one. This episode is the open the opening of what comes next. And the reason there's a next at all is because the feelings I've just been describing: the two summers feeling, the equilibrium feeling, the leaner household realization, they don't fit the phase one frame anymore. Phase one was about getting through the crisis. I'm not in crisis, I'm in this, and I needed to name it. So this is why I'm calling phase two the long walk. It's for people who didn't get out in the first 90 days, the ones still showing up, the ones who reached an equilibrium they know is conditional. The ones who are looking around and realize that they've been on this path long enough that the path itself has become normal. If that's you, this phase is for you. There are three threads that are going to run through this phase, interwoven across the episodes. The first is maintaining your sanity, the long-haul mental and emotional work. This is different from phase one's work of managing the crisis, right? The crisis had urgency. The long walk doesn't. And that lack of urgency creates its own challenges. Staying sharp when nothing is forcing you to be sharp. Staying engaged when the days start to blur. That's the sanity thread. The second is motivating yourself to keep walking. The renewal work. When you've been doing the to-do list and the applications and the prep for months, and nothing is reinforcing the discipline, you have to figure out how to keep showing up anyway. That's a different kind of work than starting fresh. It's harder in some ways, and we're going to talk about it. The third is looking for alternatives, the new reality, contract work, pivoting industries, side projects that turn into something real. Considering paths you wouldn't have considered six months ago. The longer this goes, the more the door opens to options that weren't on the table when you started. We're going to walk through what those look like. Three threads. They're going to interweave. You won't get a sanity episode followed by a motivation episode, followed by an alternatives episode. They're going to intertwine through each other, the way they intertwine through life. And here's the last thing about this phase: it doesn't have a planned ending. Phase one had eight episodes. We knew that going in. The long walk doesn't have a count. It ends when it ends. It could be next month, it could be next year. I don't know. You don't know. That's part of what makes it a long walk. You don't get a map. I want to speak directly to two kinds of listeners before we close this out. If you've been here since episode one, you've walked through crisis with me. You heard me tell my layoff story. You sat through the family conversation episode and the anxiety episode and the health episode. You heard me bomb an interview and learn from it. You've been on this walk with me from the beginning. I see you. This phase is for you. I'm not going anywhere just because the urgency wore off. The walk continues and I'm walking with you, watching where I step now. And if you're new, if you just found this podcast maybe months or years into your own unemployment, welcome. Some of what this podcast has talked about already might help you. Some of what's coming next might help you more. Either way, you're not alone here. Here's where I am as we close this out. I don't know what the next role looks like or when it comes. I don't have a triumphant ending to promise you. What I have is this. I'm still here. I'm still walking. And I'm going to keep talking honestly about what that's like week after week for as long as it takes. If you're walking this with me, welcome to the long walk. So let's recap what we've covered today. We've named what the job search actually feels like in this period. The zombie feeling of applying into the void and the fact that silence is impersonal. It's the market. We've talked about two summers, last summer with margin, this summer with less, and the energy of a house that's alive, whether or not the trip happens. We named the Equilibrium Act, the functional steadiness, sitting on top of a possible cliff. We sat with a realization about what this period has quietly been building. We introduced the new phase, the long walk, and the three threads that will run through it, right? Sanity, motivation, alternatives. And we named who this is for. Here's the key message I want you to walk away with. The long walk isn't punishment for not getting out fast enough. It's a different period with its own work. And we're going to do that work together. Next week, in episode 11, we're going to talk about what your kids will actually remember from this period. Will they remember the trip you couldn't take? Or will they remember the energy of the house? Will they remember a quiet, anxious home or a loud, silly, alive one? It's the family episode of the long walk. Not the crisis version we did back in episode 5, but the sustained version. What your kids carry with them from a period like this. If this episode resonated with you, share it with one person who needs it. And if you want to connect, you can always find me at fearfaithforest.com. Until next time, keep breathing, keep believing, keep climbing. This is Ritz Zapata for Fear Faith in the Forest. Peace.