You’ve been through a lot. A couple of things I wanted to point out:
Sometimes a job is a job. You pointed out you didn’t enjoy much when you worked and I think a lot of people don’t. I feel like society emphasizes a lot on making your job your passion, something enjoyable that you love. Sometimes we don’t have that luxury. We simply need to have a job to put food on the table and support our families. If the job is enjoyable, or you have the chance to do a job that’s enjoyable later, great, but right now focus on just finding work and not about making it the perfect job. Just keep trying and you will find a direction.
Try not to compare. Classmates and colleagues may appear well-settled in their careers for example but maybe their marriage is struggling, they have problems with their health, etc. Everyone struggles and you aren’t alone in that. It might just be easier for other people to see your career struggle.
As for depression, I will share a few things. It’s important for us to build skills to make life more manageable in hardships. Find things that you can do for yourself. I know this is considerably harder when you have children. But you do need some time to care care of yourself and do something you enjoy. Try to take care of your body as well- eating, sleeping. Focus on one day at a time and try to write down some good qualities about yourself and some things that you appreciate and enjoy about your life. Gurbani is a major help to healing depression. Use the Gurbani to speak to the mind, to understand your purpose. Doing simran also helps a lot. I know for me personally it helps me realize that my problems were not as big as I thought. Our purpose in our life is to meet God, and obtain liberation from the 8.4 million reincarnations. We have human life so we can achieve this purpose. Along this way we also have to balance family life and taking care of our body by doing work as well, but we cannot become too attached to defining ourselves by our careers or attachments either. It’s important to remember the real purpose and to spend time achieving that, then life feels like its actually going somewhere and we feel fulfilled rather than being caught up in the situations and setbacks.
I wish you the best of luck in finding a job. I really can’t say what else you can do except to keep doing Ardas and keep searching, I’m sure you will find something.
