Yeah, job hunting. Endless hope is a ridiculous expectation to expect people to hold onto. That’s the funk of a day I’m in. Recently, I wrote about how I don’t stick to only remote jobs because most work I do can be done from home. I have to hope that it gets through to someone who is reasonable.
What this looks like in reality is applying for the many, many jobs that I am able to do, all while knowing that I will likely be rejected because I need to work from my desk, not their desk. This is a different layer of shit to hold onto than usual job seekers have to put up with. Sure, everyone experiences rejection when job hunting. And if I don’t have the experience, reject away.
But I’m not being rejected for any good reason. I’m not being rejected because I lack an education, skill, or experience. I’m rejected because it’s too scary to let me work at my desk, not a desk in someone else’s office.
I had been casually looking for work all year, but started intensively looking for work on 14th April 2026. Today, as I write, this, it’s 5th June 2026. I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs. I’ve gotten nowhere. This week I am feeling (reasonably, in my opinion), bummed the fuck out about it. It took everything I had this morning to force myself to sit down at my computer and spend an hour applying for easy job (ones where you only need to change a word or two and a few clicks to apply on Seek or LinkedIn).
Until this week, I had been sticking to a rigorous schedule of job applications. This job board on that day. Covering all the relevant ones, and some less relevant ones, over the course of a week. Covering some boards twice a week. Applying for everything relevant, hoping it gets through to a sensible person who likes me skills more than they hate me for my disabilities (which have no impact on my ability to do tasks at work). This week though, I just don’t have it in me. I wanted to take most of the week off, but I knew guilt at doing zero applications would eat away at me, so I told myself I’d do easy jobs for a brief time each day. That has helped, but only with assuaging the guilt, not with progress at finding a new job to keep a roof over my head.
Endless hope is a ridiculous expectation. Speaking of reasonable expectations, I wrote this a few years ago, asking why it’s considered reasonable to have to open ourselves abuse and harassment. The question still stands.
I still don’t have an answer to that question.
Do I give in? Do I apply for only remote jobs, the ones actively advertised that way? If I do give in and restrict myself to this, then I may not get a job before my redundancy pay runs out. And I can’t get centrelink payments (long story). It feels wrong to give in, very wrong. I don’t want to give in, and I don’t want to keep seeing my time wasted. As I said in the post I linked to at the top of this article, the data doesn’t exist to give me a correct course of action.
On a related note, I’m working through final edits of my next book. When I was job hunting three years ago I kept a lot of notes about job hunting as an openly disabled person for the first time. I’m tidying up language and making it more “readable”, and sometime in the hopefully near future, I’ll be releasing it as a book. I’ll share it all over social media of course, but if you’d like to skip fickle algorithms, sign up for my newsletter to make sure you don’t miss out.
