There’s an expression in Moroccan dialect: nager dans ma mer (swimming in my own sea). It means being alone with your struggles — navigating waters that no one else can fully see, let alone understand.

Lately, that’s exactly where I am.

What rejection actually does

Job searching has become my ocean. And I don’t mean that in a poetic, this-is-hard-but-beautiful way. I mean it in the way where you’ve been treading water so long your arms are giving out and you’re starting to wonder if the shore was ever real.

The hardest part isn’t the rejection itself. It’s what it does to you over time. Each “no” chips away at something you can’t easily name — not your skills, not your qualifications on paper, but your belief that those things matter. That you matter.

The worst rejections aren’t the ones where you were a long shot. Those you can rationalize. The ones that break something are when you tick every single box and still don’t get through. When you were qualified, prepared, ready — and it still wasn’t enough. You start doing this math in your head: if I wasn’t good enough when I was a perfect match, what happens when I’m only 80% there? 60%? You stop applying for things before you’ve even read the full description.

The third world candidate problem

I almost didn’t apply for a position at a prestigious university in Manitoba. It seemed too good, too far, too much. My brain went straight to the usual inventory: I’m from Morocco. My name is not Anglo. My previous experience is from companies nobody here has heard of. My qualifications are foreign. Every box that gets you filtered out before a human being reads a word you wrote.

But I applied anyway. I even addressed the relocation question directly in my cover letter — carefully, honestly, making clear I was willing to move. I thought that was the responsible thing to do. Get ahead of the obvious concern.

I got ghosted.

Not rejected. Ghosted. No email, no automated “we’ve moved forward with other candidates,” nothing. Just silence where an answer should be.

And sitting with that silence, I realized something that stung more than a rejection would have: someone like me isn’t worth betting on. Not because of my skills specifically, but because of everything outside my control — my name, my background, my gender, where my experience comes from, the combination of factors that makes a hiring committee decide, consciously or not, that the risk of sponsoring a relocation for this particular candidate isn’t worth taking. A different candidate with the same qualifications but a different profile probably gets at least a no.

The imposter syndrome wasn’t just “I don’t know if I’m good enough.” It was more specific: I know exactly how I look on paper to a Canadian recruiter, and I know what happens to resumes like mine. Studies put it at 30 to 50% fewer callbacks for non-Anglo names. That’s not imposter syndrome. That’s pattern recognition.

And then there’s the advice to “get used to rejection, build mental toughness.” Maybe that works when you’re being rejected for a promotion, when your rent is already covered, when the stakes are ambition rather than survival. When rejection happens at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid — when what’s on the line is your ability to pay for food and housing — it doesn’t toughen you. It breaks you. Slowly, accumulation by accumulation. No amount of volunteering or upskilling or reading compensates for that erosion. People who tell you otherwise have never job searched from this place.

I came across something James Clear — the Atomic Habits guy — wrote that made me pause: “Don’t feel qualified? Nobody does. You can only be qualified to do that which you have already accomplished or trained for. Anything new is accomplished by unqualified people.”

It made me think. Specifically about how much energy I spend disqualifying myself before anyone else gets the chance to. And how the system is very happy to let me do that work for them.

The specific loneliness of this

I’m in my mid thirties. I want to be careful not to make this sound like a crisis, because it’s not — it’s more of a low, constant hum. But there’s a weight that comes with being at this stage of life and still not having landed. Not having the stability I thought I’d have by now. Not being where I pictured myself.

My family tries. They really do. They ask how the search is going, they encourage me, they remind me that I’m capable. And I know they mean it. But there’s a gap between sympathy and understanding that no amount of goodwill can close. They don’t know what it’s like to apply to hundreds of jobs in a country where your credentials are automatically devalued. They don’t know what it feels like to get a referral, do everything right, and still get rejected because the position was never really open. They don’t know the particular exhaustion of job searching as a hijab-wearing immigrant woman from the third world in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

They care. But they’re not in this water with me. Nobody is.

That’s what nager dans ma mer really means. Not just that the struggle is hard. That it’s yours in a way that resists being shared.

What I’m doing anyway

I don’t have a resolution for this. I’m not going to tell you — or myself — that the next application will be the one, or that the doubt will eventually quiet down, or that it all works out if you keep going. I don’t know any of that.

What I know is that I applied for the opportunity I almost skipped. I wrote the cover letter even though I’ve written hundreds of cover letters that went nowhere. I did the thing despite the voice in my head running through every reason it wouldn’t work.

I’m still swimming. Not gracefully. Not confidently. But moving.

Some days that’s the whole story.

Featured image courtesy of Unsplash.