Alaya woke each morning with the same gnawing ache in her chest, an ache that felt heavier than hunger, sharper than thirst. It was the ache of uncertainty, the weight of not knowing how she would make it through another month.
The days had begun to blur into a gray repetition of job portals, endless applications, and waiting for replies that never came. She sat at her desk, the glow of her laptop casting a pale light across her tired face, and tried to summon the hope that had become so fragile inside her.
She had been a good student once, diligent, bright, the kind of person who believed that if you worked hard and followed the path, doors would open. She was a programmer, a designer, a musician, an artist—someone who had built herself piece by piece, discipline by discipline. Yet here she was, reduced to typing her name and experience into automated forms that would filter her out before a human ever read her words.
The pandemic had reshaped the world, but it had shattered hers. Companies cut staff, projects vanished, opportunities dissolved. Even when the restrictions began to lift, the market was no longer the same. Employers wanted skills she had but did not recognize, or they sought the young, the shiny, the ones with no “gaps” in their CVs. Every rejection became a small stab, and with each stab she felt herself shrink.
Her days became a ritual: coffee, laptop, application, rejection. She would scroll through postings, reading job descriptions that seemed to demand ten people’s worth of expertise for the salary of none. Positions for junior developers asked for five years of experience, designers were expected to code like engineers, and freelancers were expected to deliver miracles for pennies.
There were moments she questioned herself deeply. Was she truly skilled, or had her talents been an illusion? Had she wasted her youth studying, practicing, learning, only to arrive here—unwanted, unneeded? The silence after sending a CV was often worse than a direct “no.” She would check her inbox repeatedly, refreshing with a mix of dread and desperate hope. But the empty inbox was merciless, and each day it told her the same story: you are invisible.
To ease the suffocating loneliness, Alaya sometimes tried to imagine the hiring managers reading her applications. She pictured them smiling, saying, “This is the one.” She even whispered small prayers over each submission: “Please, let this be it.” But the prayers disappeared into the digital void. And in time, she stopped picturing hope.
Her friends no longer asked how her job search was going. In the early months, they had shown curiosity, even encouragement, but as the months turned into years, their silence deepened. They had their own struggles, their own distractions, and perhaps her endless searching was uncomfortable to hear. She felt like a ghost, wandering through conversations with nothing to add but stories of rejection.
Then came the inflation. Prices rose sharply, first after the pandemic, then again with the war in Ukraine. The cost of bread, of milk, of heating—all of it pressed down on her. Every bill was a reminder that time was running out. Work wasn’t just about dignity anymore—it was about survival. She began skipping meals, stretching groceries longer than she should. She bought cheaper soap, reused tea bags, and dimmed the lights at night. The walls of her apartment felt closer, more suffocating, as though mocking her poverty.
Sometimes she tried to escape into her creativity. She would play the accordion softly at night, her fingers moving over the keys with a tenderness she didn’t often allow herself to feel. Music was a refuge, but even it reminded her of absence—of stages never reached, audiences that never came, songs unshared. Her paintings, too, piled up in corners, colorful testimonies of a soul trying to stay alive. But art did not pay rent. And each brushstroke carried the silent accusation: “This won’t save you.”
There was also the growing shadow of artificial intelligence. In the forums she frequented, in the tech communities she once felt part of, everyone was talking about it—AI replacing coders, designers, writers. At first, she resisted the fear. She thought, surely, human creativity cannot be replaced. But the more she saw—AI tools writing code, generating graphics, producing text at lightning speed—the more she felt displaced. The very industry she had trained for was slipping away beneath her feet.
Some nights she lay awake, staring at the ceiling, and imagined herself screaming into the void: “I am here! I am still worth something! Don’t erase me!” But no one answered. The silence was crushing, as though the world had already moved on without her.
One afternoon, she sat in front of her laptop, scrolling through freelance postings. A client wanted a logo, budget five dollars. Another wanted an entire e-commerce website, “experienced developer only,” budget twenty. She laughed, but it wasn’t real laughter—it was the sound of breaking. Her skills were reduced to scraps in the global market, scraps that weren’t even enough to feed a stray cat. She wondered if dignity had a price tag, and if she had already sold hers in these desperate clicks.
She began to avoid mirrors. Her reflection looked older, heavier, burdened. She was not the woman she used to be—the lively student, the dreamer, the believer in a future bright with possibility. Now her hair hung unbrushed more often than not, her clothes were worn, her smile rare. She felt the world’s judgment pressing into her body: too many kilos, too plain, too poor, too invisible. Every failed interview seemed to whisper, “You are not enough.”
Her parents called from the countryside, their voices warm but distant. They asked gently about her search, but she could hear the worry beneath their words. She didn’t want to burden them, didn’t want to confess the full weight of her struggles. So she lied sometimes, soft lies: “I’ve sent applications, something might come up soon.” But deep down, she knew that hope was thinning like smoke.
On particularly dark days, she thought of the people who had hurt her—the false loves, the so-called friends, the therapist who had taken her money and abandoned her, the homeless man who had betrayed her trust. She thought of them, and the bitterness rose. Why did the world seem to reward liars and takers, while people like her were left scraping at the edges of survival?
But then her cat would curl into her lap, warm and purring, and for a moment, she remembered softness. She remembered that not everything was cruel. She would stroke its fur, whispering, “At least you see me.” And the animal, with its silent loyalty, gave her a thread of strength to keep going.
Still, the job search never stopped. It was the rhythm of her days, even when it crushed her spirit. She woke, searched, applied, was rejected. She woke again, repeated the cycle. Each application was like throwing a bottle into a vast ocean, hoping someone, somewhere, would uncork it and see her worth. But oceans are wide, and bottles sink.
At night, she sometimes imagined a different life. A life where her talents were valued, where she walked into an office or a studio and people smiled because they knew she could create something beautiful. She imagined financial stability, clothes that fit her with dignity, a home without fear of eviction, a car to carry her to her parents without the shame of dragging suitcases on buses. She imagined love—someone who looked at her not with pity or condescension, but with genuine recognition. Someone who said, “I see you. You are enough.”
But imagination was not reality. Reality was the inbox, the bills, the silence.
Searching for work, and finding nothing, was not just about employment. It was about identity. Each rejection carved at her sense of self, each silence told her she did not matter, each day without progress blurred her vision of the future.
And yet—despite the weight, despite the cruelty—she still woke up. She still sat at her laptop. She still searched. Something within her, a fragile flame that refused to die, kept whispering: “Keep going. Do not surrender.” It was the truth of her, the part that the world had not yet managed to crush.
Because deep inside, Alaya knew—a woman’s worth was not measured by her salary, her status, or her possessions. It was measured by her endurance, by her refusal to disappear, by her insistence to live, even when the world told her not to.
And so, another morning came. She brewed her coffee, opened her laptop, and once again typed her name into the void, praying that somewhere, somehow, someone would finally answer.
from the book: The Truth of a Woman
Comments
Post a Comment