The following is a guest post I did over at When I Grow Up Coach.

It’s last winter. I’m working full-time as a proofreader/copy editor for an ad agency. The branch I work for is based in-house at an automotive corporation. The automotive folks are fantastic; the agency directly providing my paycheck is, how you say, a joke. I’m miserable. I’ve spent many, many hours sending out resume and cover letter after resume and cover letter. Arranging furtive phone interviews in the ladies’ room and from my car, I am in awe at how I’m just not getting hired. It’s never been this hard for me to find a job. Becoming a stay-at-home-mom is totally out of the question; our family needs to be a two-income family. (Los Angeles is many great things, but inexpensive is not one of them.)

I feel beyond stuck. And beyond guilty, reminding myself of the statistic I heard somewhere: if you are lucky enough to live in Southern California, assuming you’re not below the poverty line, you’re doing better than 97% of the planet. It comes in handy sometimes, but in this situation, working-class guilt is a tremendous debilitator. Because even though I’m more burnt out every day, more tired and dull and just lame, I feel like I’m being greedy for wanting something fulfilling out of my Monday-through-Friday.

But I do. I want more. A lot more. And I am beginning to think I’m never going to be able to make it happen. Partly because, although I know what sets me ablaze and what I am really, really good at, I’m not sure how to transform those things into a job. Also, I am busy blaming my inherent interest in the world at large for the position I’m in. If I were the type of person who has always wanted to be a chemist, or a baker, or a cop, I wouldn’t be in this quandary. I’d have found my niche long ago and settled in for the long haul.

Instead, I’m the type of person who finds a million things fascinating. I want to learn about almost everything. I know a little about a lot, and a lot about a little–most important: words and connecting people. My interests would require a few more lifetimes for satisfactory exploration, to say nothing of my hobbies. Needless to say, my work experience is varied. Checkered. Some might say random. I’ve worked in PR, film and television production, publishing, sales, the spa industry, the automotive industry, the dot-com industry. I’ve been a manager three times, a massage therapist once, a director of editorial once and an assistant too many times to count. And that long, meandering path has led me here, to a job that should have been fantastic and was instead awful.

I’m a bit of a pathetic clod at this point, quite frankly. And then along comes February 2. I am laid off, given a short severance option and a box for my belongings, and then escorted out of the office. (My boss doesn’t say good-bye, make eye contact or even remind me not to let the door hit me in the arse. Stay classy, boss man!).

Well. Everything changes.

I had four weeks of my normal paltry paycheck coming, and after that, about 60% of that paycheck, courtesy of unemployment benefits. I had no idea what to do. It was surreal. It was a tiny bit scary.

But mostly, it was effing magical.

I felt as though I could breathe again. As I recall, my first act was to send out a text — before even starting my car — saying, “I’ve just been laid off. Hallelujah! Let the rest of my life begin!”

And did it ever. Let me back up a bit, though, to just a few months before the layoff, when two seemingly small things set the stage in a way I couldn’t have imagined. Thing one: I read an article in (now-defunct) Domino magazine about a book called Style Statement and the two women who’d produced it. It seemed like a fabulous book, so I ordered it. When it arrived, I flipped through it and saw a photo of one of the two women, the lovely and amazing Danielle LaPorte, and thought, I need to know her.

Thing two: at the urging of a co-worker (whom I hadn’t seen in months, but ran into as she was eating lunch in my building because she’d gotten lost on the way to a meeting–true story!), I attended an event put on by a local nonprofit organization called WriteGirl. (Fantastic organization, by the way.) Colleen Wainwright, aka The Communicatrix, whose blog I’d just started reading, was one of the speakers. Just before I left I saw her in the courtyard and totally accosted her. I told her how cool I thought she was and that I loved her writing. To her credit, she didn’t call the police, but rather encouraged me to email her.

So I did. I emailed her to say that I very much needed a session of her particular brand of kung fu, but I was completely broke and would she be interested in a barter? Mind you, this was terrifying to me. And I told her as much, saying I was afraid that she would think I was uber-lame and that she and all the other awesome internet ladies would laugh me off the internet. But, you know, what did I have to lose, really? So I hit send, and less than a day later, she responded, saying absolutely she was interested in bartering. (Owning a massage table: handy.)

The Communicatrix session resulted, partly and perhaps most notably, in my making some changes to the blog I had then. I began posting interviews every Monday with people I thought were interesting. For the very first one, I emailed Danielle LaPorte, again ignoring that awful fear that I was nowhere near cool enough. But, like Colleen, she too said yes. And then so did lots of other people (Mark McGuinness, Andrea Scher, Peter Green and Daniel Pink, to name a few, and of course the lovely Michelle Ward! *Note from Michelle: I didn’t put the “lovely” in there – I have Emma fooled!*).

So then I got laid off. And I sent out two to three different email blasts, to different groups of people in my life, letting them know I was looking for work and what my skill set was. And I blogged about it. And Tweeted about it. And Facebooked about it.

And this is the part I still can’t quite get over: it worked. It totally worked. Friends (including Danielle and Colleen) recommended me, thus sending freelance work my way. And the people I did work for recommended me to other people. A web designer in my area started following me on Twitter. We got to be friends and planned a meet-up for local freelancers and creatives. Then we became business partners: we co-own Litmus Studio, a brand identity agency. We create and refine all levels of brand identity for remarkable people and organizations. (The “remarkable” bit is very important to us.)

All of which is immensely pleasing to a girl with enthusiastic interest in nearly everything, but particularly using words to connect people with themselves and with one another. If I’m doing my job well, I become a part of a different world with each project, each client. I learn about different markets, aspirations, likes and dislikes, worldviews–worlds, period–plus, I get to do the thing I love most: write and create.

Quite frankly, it’s a little bit like a fairy tale. All that stuff you hear about how great it is to be your own boss? Yeah, it’s true. It’s also time-consuming, confusing and nerve-wracking at times. But the worst day of working for myself still beats the best day I’ve ever had working for someone else.

Truly: I had not realized that being this happy was an option.

Image by margolove via Flickr/Creative Commons license.