some people crash 2 or 3 times and then learn from their mistakes

Great Job Hunt of '13 update: still unemployed. I've been saying "funemployed" recently because it is moderately less depressing. What people who aren't unemployed (aka the "employed") forget is how dispiriting the experience of unemployment is. What a blow it is to your sense of self-worth as a person. I can't find work, and what if it is because there is something fundamentally wrong with me? I have a fraud complex at the best of times and this doesn't help. I read Studs Terkel's oral history of the Depression recently, and that was one of the themes running through it. How the Depression wasn't awful just because people were hungry and poor, it was awful because it hit people where it hurt: their sense of dignity, their concept of themselves as functioning, productive people. It didn't matter that everyone around them was unemployed too. The Great Depression was a catastrophe on a personal level as much as it was an institutional one. 

All that to say that I'm struggling with a similar problem. The longer you look for work without finding it, the less confidant you become in yourself as a person capable of working. Am I looking in the wrong places? You could make the argument. Am I being picky? Undoubtedly. I don't like the idea of settling, or maybe there's a fear that there's nothing else out there I'm really even capable of doing. I'm trying to land a career, not just a job. A frustrating distinction. Feel like I'm only circling around the issue here. Anyway.