The reality of “failing” as an employee
Journey In Unemployment Land #30 | I ignored being an artist and it bit me in the ass.
I posted on LinkedIn over a month ago that I shifted the bulk of my writing to Substack. I wrote on LinkedIn about my Journey In Unemployment since June 2024. Initially, I began posting as a way to change my focus. I wrote consistently for two years at a marketing agency; it was strange, after being laid off, to have nothing to do or write about. My post talked covered everything: adopting a dog; taking care of my finances; fighting for unemployment insurance and losing that fight; interviewing and being denied jobs; the emotional roller coaster of not knowing how I’d survive; plus the struggle to get up and try again.
At first, I didn’t think anyone was reading except the 30 or so people who left reactions regularly. These were individuals I knew well. To them, I say, again, thank you. But then, I checked my numbers: I had over 40k points of engagement in a year. I hadn’t meant to do anything but, my posting became a rallying point for myself and my colleagues who’d been laid off or unemployed long term.
Ultimately, it’s these numbers that encouraged me to shift to Substack. I’m not trying to be rich or anything. In fact, the majority of my content will continue to be free. However, I can write more here than I can within the confines of LinkedIn.
So, here we go! I’m back, y’all! 👏🏿
What have I been up to this past month?
🏡 I got my household together: emotionally and financially. If you’re unemployed or underemployed, you know how taxing it can be. There were days where I felt stuck and unable to function from the stress, but I had to “unstick” myself. I had long conversations with friends and my spouse, Mike. Everyone came to the conclusion that I’d been in crisis mode too long. My body can’t handle it anymore.
💼 I decided to stop actively job hunting. The very act of sitting down to fill out applications on Indeed gave me heart palpitations. I’ll write more about the mental health issues later.
🫱🏽🫲🏿I focused on maintaining the freelance relationships that I have. While it isn’t where I want to be, freelancing has given me freedom to take care of myself while figuring out what the next step in my life is. I’m grateful for it and I’m eager to see what working for myself will feel like.
🍸I completed a bartender course and got ServSafe Alcohol certified! This may seem like an odd decision, but the reality is: I need to get out the house, y’all. I’m tired of working on my computer constantly. I love what I do; my back hates it, though. So, you will find me at a bar somewhere in the Atlanta metro area.
🥰 I tapped back into what makes me happy. I’m going to be featured in a fan zine for Yu Yu Hakusho (a 90s animation and comic series from Japan. If you know, you know.). Links are coming and previews on my Substack!
📚I started working on a novel and editing for independent writers after being away for almost 6 years. I love writing. I’m really glad that I started writing fiction again. I forgot how much joy it brought me. And it’s about time I reclaimed my time, even if times are uncertain.
Maybe being an employee isn’t for me?
I’ve had a lot of failures in my professional career. Rather, I’ve experienced a lack of trajectory in the way that my peers around me seemingly have. “Comparison is the thief of joy” or however the phrase goes.
I spent the majority of my 20s in and out of dead-end jobs, earning a Master’s degree in Science that only added to the mountain of student loan debt, and a series of fruitless professional relationships that either left me traumatized or broke, or some toxic combination of both. Sometimes I’d spiral into bouts of depression thinking about how horrible it all felt: why were my peers getting promotions, going on lavish trips abroad, and earning allocates and I couldn’t?
During one of these depressive episodes, I’d accidentally called my friend Pam (Pam was one of three Pamela’s in my contacts). She took the accident in stride—content to chat with me for almost an hour. We’d attended undergrad together, only three doors between our dorm rooms, and we were one of a handful of black women on a predominately white Women’s college campus.
I fondly recall how eager we were during those years and, while we reminisced, I lamented about how horrible it had been staying employed. I wondered if I’d been wasting my education, had gone down the wrong path, or if I just didn’t know how to play the game. Pam—ever the realistic optimist—said to me kindly: “It sounds like you need to work for yourself. Some people just don’t make good employees and you just might be one of them.”
At first, I’d been offended. Now, I think there is truth in what she said. I had that conversation in 2020, smack dab in the middle of Covid-19 Pandemic. I’d been fired three times over at that point: once from a consulting firm in December 2019 and from two restaurant gigs I picked up in February 2020 to try to recover from said firing. (Mind you, this particular gap in my employment is a long story that I plan on making a designated post for. It’s not a fun story, but I’m ready to share it.)
I bring up this moment in my life because I hadn’t wanted to work for other people, but I’d felt compelled to do so. I followed well meaning individuals’ advice: get a job, stick to something, make some money, then worry about being a writer. I spent years forcing myself to occupy spaces that didn’t suite me, forcing myself into roles where I behaved in ways that aren’t natural for me: pinned up, polished, rehearsed, and quantifiable.
Ultimately, I couldn’t keep that up and the lack of consistency was very difficult for managers because, as a function of most jobs, you must replicate tasks on a daily basis. I struggle with that. I struggle with things that are very, very rigid. And that may be a consequence of artistry, that may be a consequence of what the psychiatrists are now calling ADHD. But regardless of why I struggled to handle the most rudimentary jobs, the sense of failure is real.
What employment failures look like on paper isn’t pretty.
Failure is a thing that I grapple with. When you look at my resume, there's a just a stint of months-long or year or two engagements with no longevity to speak of. Rarely were any of these my decision. I do believe that I’ve been fired repeatedly has to do with my inability to conform or reliably replicate to the standards of efficiency. Some could say that most employment systems are designed for me to fail; this what my elder brothers, advisors and mentors tell me. However, to recruiters, to managers, to most people: it doesn’t matter, so I end up creating narratives to explain these gaps, which, ultimately, are thinly veiled truths.
It’s exceedingly difficult for me to continue that farce. Hence, I've decided to just be a working artist. It doesn't sit well with me to continue to prove something to someone that isn't entirely true. I didn’t “strategically” take these positions nor were these gaps happenstances.
The fact of the matter is that I worked and kept jobs to survive. I didn't work most of these jobs because it was my passion. I had a certain skill-set, it translated somewhere, and I landed the gig. I took the gigs because I had bills to pay. I didn't have a mother or a brother or anyone to pay my bills. Up until recently, it has been “me, myself, and I” trying to figure out how I was going to pay my utilities.
What my employment history looks like doesn’t change my reality.
To further complicate things, I worry a lot about perception: I’m a black woman, and if I had been white, if I had been male and white, a question of my work style would never have been brought up. There would've been a understanding that I delivered, and it didn't matter how I got it done, just that I did it.
But I am neither male nor white nor neurotypical. What I have been is placed in performance improvement plans that went nowhere. This led to me seeking FMLA and taking ADHD medications and all of these other things to try to get me to “perform”.
There is something insidious about that happening. That is yet another story I intend to tell (see, you should totally subscribe). For now, you should know that I don't want to be in a position anymore trying to explain because, honestly, it isn't anyone's business. I’m tired of justifying my experiences.
I don’t believe I’m alone in this exhaustion. There are several thousands of Americans who are unemployed. The last time I checked (in mid-August 2025), the unemployment rate is hovering somewhere around 3.7%. I suspect there’s a staggering number of Americans who are underemployed. By underemployed, I mean people who are working part-time like I am making 20 to 30 hours a week to barely pay their bills and then you have credit card debt on top of that.
It feels like the country is teetering on the border of a crisis. I cannot control that. What I can control is recognizing where I am at. After thinking long and hard about it, I believe its my responsibility is to be an artist--an artist that bears witness to the nonsense that we are going through and try to parcel out meaning.
Meaning from what everyone is trying to make meaningless.
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My name is Shanice, but you can call me SABLE. I’m creating a community where artists and professionals can share their experiences, be intelligent and take up space in a world that rejects expertise and the messy nature of creation.
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