I Am Here: 2,000 Applications, 5 Interviews, and the Math of Invisible Rejection
On the snow globe, the dandelion, and what the unemployment numbers fail to count.
I am here.
There’s a moment in “Horton Hears a Who” by Dr. Seuss when the entire civilization of Whoville, a whole community, fully real, fully alive, fully present, is screaming into the void from a dandelion.
We are here.
We are here.
We are here.
And nothing can hear them.
Not because they aren’t loud enough.
Not because they aren’t real enough.
Because the world they’re screaming into doesn’t have the equipment to receive the signal.
I’ve been thinking about that A LOT lately.
I am here.
Two thousand-plus applications.
Five interviews.
Three years.
I am here.
The Math Nobody Talks About
Let me put those numbers in a row so they can be looked at directly.
2,000 applications.
5 interviews.
3 years.
That’s a 0.25% response rate.
Not rejection.
Response.
As in, someone acknowledged the signal existed at all.
The other 1,995 applications went somewhere, an inbox, an algorithm, or a black hole with a submit button, and produced nothing.
No. Thank you for applying.
We’ve decided to move in a different direction.
Nothing.
Just silence.
Which is its own kind of answer.
Here’s what that silence accumulates into over three years: not just disappointment.
Not just frustration.
Something more structural than that.
A recalibration of baseline.
A jadedness that sets in so gradually you don’t notice it until someone points out you’ve become blunt. Or harsh.
Or that the optimism that used to be your default setting has been quietly replaced by something flatter.
That’s not a character flaw.
That’s arithmetic.
What the Government Doesn’t Count
Here’s something most people don’t know about unemployment statistics.
If you lose your job and file for unemployment insurance, you’re counted in the statistics you hear reported everywhere.
You exist in the data.
The government sees you.
But unemployment insurance runs out.
And when it does, if you’re still unemployed, still looking, still sending applications into the void, you disappear from the numbers.
You’re no longer counted as unemployed.
You become what economists quietly call “discouraged” or “long-term unemployed," and you get folded into a different category that doesn’t make the headline number.
The headline says the economy is doing fine.
You are not in the headline.
Now add this: I’m 1099.
Self-employed.
Which means I never qualified for unemployment insurance in the first place.
I’ve been paying into a system for thirty years that doesn’t pay out when the system fails me. And when paying self-employoment tax I feel like they’re double-dipping into my pocket, WTAF?
I believe the self-employed get stuck bending over to pickup the governments soap far too much.
The market said no 1,995 times, and the government said, "We don’t see you either.”
I am here.
The dandelion is on the ground.
Nobody heard it land.
The Snow Globe
I’ve used this image before, and I keep coming back to it.
Imagine a snow globe.
Inside: warmth, light, a world that makes sense.
People with jobs and social lives and dinner plans and the particular ease that comes from having enough agency to make choices about your own life.
I’ve been on the outside of that globe for a long time.
Not pressing my face against it dramatically. Just outside.
Looking in at a world that seems to be operating by rules I used to understand.
The rejection didn’t put me outside the orbit.
The car did that years ago.
But every rejection since has been a reminder that the glass is still there.
That the warmth is still on the other side of it.
That I can see it clearly and describe it precisely and still not be inside it.
Thursday’s rejection didn’t create that feeling.
It just made it louder.
The Unicorn Problem
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about why the numbers look the way they do.
The ‘job’ market in the U.S. is built for horses.
It has stables for horses.
It has categories and job titles for horses.
It has LinkedIn checkboxes and ATS systems all designed to identify, sort, and hire horses.
I am not a horse.
Thirty years.
Eight design disciplines.
Thirty business sectors.
A nervous system stress-tested at the extreme end of human experience and still operational.
A brain that thinks in 3D, connects dots across domains, translates the complex into the navigable, and has been doing it professionally since before the internet existed.
That’s not a resume gap.
That’s a unicorn.
And the market, the algorithm, and the recruiter with fifteen open roles and a twelve-minute window to screen candidates doesn’t have a checkbox for “unicorn.”
So the application goes into the void.
The silence comes back.
The math gets worse.
And the dandelion keeps screaming.
I am here.
I am here.
I am here.
What Accumulates
This is the part that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it.
Rejection, when it arrives occasionally, is manageable.
You feel it.
You process it.
You move on.
But rejection at this scale:
2,000 times over three years,
layered on top of living in the car for 16 months,
layered on 5 years of losing all sense of identity,
layered on top of a divorce being negotiated in real time,
layered on living with 40 years of treatment-resistant depression,
doesn’t arrive as individual events anymore.
It arrives as weather.
And when the weather is bad enough for long enough, it stops being weather and starts being climate.
The baseline shifts.
The optimism that used to be default gets replaced by something that has to be chosen deliberately, consciously, every single morning.
Some mornings that choice is easy.
Some mornings it costs everything you have.
Thursday was the second kind.
What It Hasn’t Taken
Here’s what three years of this has not managed to take from me.
My persistence of existence.
It has tried.
Consistently.
With considerable force.
It has not succeeded.
I am still here.
Still sending.
Still building.
Still recording walks and turning them into something that might reach someone who needs to know they’re not alone in this particular kind of invisibility.
I don’t say that as a triumph.
I say it as a fact.
The dandelion got stepped on.
Dropped.
Maybe mowed over.
But the Who’s are still in there.
Still making noise.
Still alive on a speck.
More soon.
Part 2 is this upcoming Thursday and where it gets more raw.
Thanks for being here, and for your attention.
Especially if you’re in this too.
Please share with others who might benefit.
Be well.
Bert
Brilliantly written Bert, so real, so raw, so relatable to so many ❤️
I never filed this time around. So the government does not see me either. It was dumb on my part not to file but I felt like I was going to get immediately hired in the first few months. Then when I gave up on casino work and expanded to applying for all sorts of jobs, even Sam's Club, Costco, the local supermarket, that I would be hired quickly. Now, 9 months later, I wish I had filed.