For all the self-indulgent bullshit that I fill this blog with, I can’t stress enough how important other people are to this. Yes, I’m mostly writing my little notes to myself, but even though that is how I write, it changes when I hit publish.

I started this blog right after I graduated from college. I was unemployed and confused and I didn’t know what to do. That year was so fucking difficult and I think that I sometimes lose sight of that because the intensity of those feelings gets dampened by the hazy glow of memory.

I don’t care how redundant I get with this sentiment; it can be found all over this blog because I mean it that much. This little corner of the internet in which a group of similarly confused twenty-sometimes word vomit all over everything was essential to making that tolerable and helping me sort my life out.

I say it again now because it is so very true. Again.

Friday was my last day of my job. Or, rather, my last day as a full-time, in-office person. I am staying on as a part-time, location-independent contractor. It’s my last day of this job, but probably not my last day of WHOAMIWHATAMIDOING panic, because that would be too simple.

The last couple weeks have been long and hard and it isn’t likely to be any less stressful any time soon. The thing is, as anxiety-inducing as it has been to blast my failures on the internet, it was a great decision. I am a little terrified of what it means to future employers, but my stance on burning the privacy-bridge on this blog has been mentioned earlier and will require its own post if I’m going to reopen that conversation. That aside, I stand by this decision because I have all sorts of people either (1) reminding me that it’s going to be all right -or- (2) commiserating with me about the fact that we’re all in this same stupid mess together.

So: thank you. Thank you to people who have emailed me their own unemployed/underemployed stories. Thank you for holding my hand over the internet. Thank you to people whose blogs I read, whose feelings of total-shit-show-ness are intensely relatable and reassuring.

Knowing that there is at least a large enough number of us who feel like permanent hot messes to declare it some kind of normal has been the greatest comfort I could ask for.

Thanks, internet.