Jobless for months, these professionals find time to cry, to connect, to hunt for work and to reimagine

YOU SEE A LOT of brave faces and hear whispers of strained optimism among the jobless in this recession.

It's as if, in the wake of America's worst economic downturn in generations with an unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent and workers staying unemployed for longer stretches, people are clinging to the notion that we're enduring just another cyclical blip. Most don't seem willing, much less able, to consider that we've entered a permanent new reality.

Of course, if you took to heart all the forecasts of a jobless recovery, or reports that many of the jobs shed in this downturn may never come back, or the prospect of slogging through a recession with skills that don't seem viable, you'd have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning.

Jobless workers, more than most, have to be masters of a peculiar craft — fixing your eyes on the horizon when an abyss separates you and the future.

The economy may be stuck in a rut, but on a personal level, you keep moving in any way that makes sense for the moment. In the absence of a job and a paycheck, holding on to your dignity and good spirits may be the biggest challenge.

Wendy Lin knows firsthand the coldly indiscriminate power of this recession, where even workers for this region's iconic white-collar firms are not immune.

One day last March the 32-year-old manager for a Seattle company that sells data storage to other firms walked into her boss' office for what she thought was a routine confab, only to find the human resources director there, too.

The company was "making efficiencies" and needed to eliminate her position, the supervisors told Lin, who sat there in shock as they went over her severance package and presented some documents to sign.

"Pretty much my jaw dropped," she recalls.

"And then it was, 'Goodbye.' "

"I had five minutes to pack up my stuff," she says. "I didn't say goodbye to anyone; I just walked out."

Which emotion was she supposed to feel at a moment like this? Surprise? Anger? Sadness? They all washed over her at the same time.

Lin thought she was a valued worker. In her mind, her position in the company was sound. Now she wondered what she did to make herself so expendable, even considering the recession.

She blamed herself.

Her identity and sense of self-worth were so bound up in her job that it was hard to make a psychological break.

"I took it personally," she says.

She got in her car and drove. On the way home, she called her mom and let it out. And for the next two weeks, she just cried.

In an instant, her whole life was upended.

"It was odd just going from working all day to having the whole day free," she says.

Before, she lived for the weekend. Now she was living in a perpetual weekend.

Lin didn't have much money saved, so she started applying for jobs online and blogging about unemployed life at planetjobless.blogspot.com to help process what happened. Blogs and online forums have blossomed into a cultural phenomenon among laid-off workers in the current recession, reassuring readers they are far from alone.

Lin's mom works at Boeing and her dad is a University of Washington professor. They instilled a sweetly simple lesson in their daughter as she grew up: Work hard and you'll be rewarded.

But just to be safe, they encouraged her to pick a large, well-known company like Microsoft or Boeing, thinking firms like those would be less likely to cut workers loose at a moment's notice. Her parents meant well. But Lin came of age professionally in an era when downsizing was a way of life, and it was basically every worker for himself.

Lin had bought a new car last fall. She and her boyfriend purchased a three-story, 1920s home less than two years ago.

Instead of feeling desperate, though, Lin decided to do what so many laid-off workers are doing this time around: Pick a new career path instead of waiting to return to the old one.

In Lin's case, she wants to leave the cubicle life behind and become a yoga instructor. Lin returned from an intensive, nine-week training in Palm Springs, Calif., this summer and felt good about the prospects, though she was aware of the risks, financial and otherwise, that come with such a radical change.

She looks back on her former job track, with its long hours and relentless pace, and thinks she can live without it.

"GOOD RIDDANCE." It's the ultimate kiss-off, a way to keep your pride intact when fate tries to take you down a peg.

If Lin's dramatic shift in careers quietly embodies that sentiment, Audrey Lincoff's attitude practically screams it.

As she strides around West Seattle's Alki Beach neighborhood talking about her life on the jobless rolls, one can't help but note how this 53-year-old former Expedia executive is dressed.

"This is an out-of-work corporate executive: flip-flops, tank top and a Krispy Kreme sweat shirt," Lincoff says, surveying her new weekday attire. "I used to be an Ann Taylor/Nordstrom person. Now I'm an Old Navy person."

She describes leaving her job as vice president for communications at Expedia in November as "going from 100 miles an hour to zero."

Fortunately for her, the split was a mutual agreement. Business on the Web site had plummeted because of the recession, meaning cutbacks at the company, but Lincoff was already in need of a change and felt she could weather the recession.

At any rate, nothing could compare to her years working at Starbucks before landing the Expedia job. As she goes on about the coffee company, it becomes obvious Lincoff still has a deep connection to her former workplace. It became like a second home, which probably didn't sit well with her husband at the time. Lincoff doesn't deny that her devotion to work contributed to the dissolution of the marriage.

"I'm one of the fortunate ones who can look at this and say, 'What can I learn from this?' " Lincoff says of unemployment.

"If there are non-negotiables in my life, now I know what they are," she says.

As Lincoff looks to get a foothold in consulting work, she has no interest in returning to brick-and-mortar corporate life, where you are so tied to work that when you look in the mirror you see your company's logo staring back at you.

If there is to be a new normal, she hopes to make the rules herself.

"That's so much better than the fear and anxiety" of wondering what's next, she says. "To sit and think that I'm only as successful as the boss or the company — that's not me."

Well, not anymore.

This is the same woman who, when she left Expedia, wrote Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz an e-mail saying his company's business ethic is "woven into my DNA."

The affection is clear but the paradox is not so easy to reconcile.

BEFORE LINCOFF'S tenure at Expedia came to an end, one of the things she had to do was lay off a staffer and personal friend in her department, Maura Donaghey.

Because a project she was working on needed to be finished, Donaghey wound up staying on until January, longer than Lincoff.

But that same month, Donaghey's boyfriend, Jeff Mak, lost his financial-analysis job at Washington Mutual as the failed savings-and-loan got folded into Chase.

So, in a matter of days, they became a 40-something couple with no paychecks.

Donaghey's dad worked for AT&T in Boston for 37 years. Job happiness and inspiration were luxuries back then. But the job paid back in other ways.

"That's how my family got into the middle class," Donaghey says.

Still, the contrast between that type of work life and the one she knows is striking.

She remembers an aunt back East who worked 45 years for AT&T and received a little bracelet studded with slivers of diamonds, rather than whole ones. " 'Is that all you're worth after 45 years — three diamond chips?' " she recalls thinking at the time.

Somehow, though, Donaghey retained some optimism about her own value in the work world.

In December, a year into her new job as global events director at Expedia, that all changed.

She was on vacation in Hawaii, feeling secure about her status at the company, even considering the downturn, when she received a call saying her position had been eliminated.

"She just turned whiter than white," her partner, Mak, says, thinking back on that day.

"For 20 years of a career, I felt attached to a company," says the 44-year-old, who also formerly worked at Starbucks. Being cut loose was like being disconnected from your identity. It was disorienting.

"All the rules changed," she says.

Mak, 49, has had to switch careers and start from scratch before, so in January he was more prepared, mentally, for upheaval.

Donaghey and Mak have cut back their expenses so they can survive the recession financially and regroup professionally. They are trying to make the best of a bad situation by spending more time together. Mak also has more time to volunteer with a youth group called Chill that teaches life skills to at-risk kids through snowboarding.

"It's my new state of being," Donaghey says of unemployment. But "it's not a club you want to stay in for too long."

In other cases, defiance in the face of joblessness morphs into denial, says Marléna Sessions, chief executive of the nonprofit Workforce Development Council of King County.

She remembers visiting a career center set up in the Washington Mutual Tower in November for bank employees losing their jobs in Seattle and being struck by the blithe attitude of some who turned down offers to be relocated out-of-town.

"It was fascinating to hear them say, 'Oh, I'm not leaving Seattle. It's beautiful here,' " she recalls. "Then fast-forward three or four months and they're saying, 'Gee whiz, I should have taken that relocation offer.' "

BY THE TIME most job seekers sit down with employment counselor Lucia Faithfull at the Renton Worksource unemployment counseling office, they have hit an emotional rock bottom. "There's a lot of hand-holding; there's a lot of tears," she says, noting some people "kind of explode" into rants about their situations.

The first big task is to build up the clients' confidence.

"We make assumptions about what a skill is, and people, by and large, underestimate what they have to offer," Faithfull says.

She wishes she had more to offer, in the form of job opportunities, in return.

"It's just kind of frustrating for us to figure out where to direct people, because we don't know what's going to be in demand," she says. Jobs are scarce in almost every sector.

Right now, Faithfull has a caseload of 50 to 80 people, depending on the month, and she's worried the recession will get worse before it gets better.

"I'm holding my breath," she says, for the other shoe to drop.

In the meantime, many who show up at unemployment offices are resorting to working for themselves.

Deek Carpenter, 34, wants to go into business as an adviser to entrepreneurs starting new ventures or go to optometry school.

It's a fallback strategy that offers a psychological grounding as he deals with being laid off last October from his land-acquisitions job at a Seattle civil-engineering firm.

Softspoken and not prone to gripe, Carpenter says he is the first in his immediate family to deal with an extended layoff, so this is relatively uncharted territory.

He could either take the advice of counselors at the unemployment office who say the best he can hope for right now is temporary work, or he can take a shot at working for himself.

He's already fielding calls from people, many of whom are themselves unemployed, seeking business advice.

Besides, what else is he to do? He'd sent out about 60 resumes and by midsummer had received just two callbacks from prospective employers.

"It's not the direction that I wanted to take just yet, but it's falling into my lap," Carpenter says.

AS MARCY Maki strode out of the Worksource employment counseling office in Renton one day this summer, she carried a look not of cheery optimism but of determination.

Her lipstick and blush were just so, her short dark hair fell in perfect waves, her suit was crisp and professional, her handshake firm. She looked and sounded the part of hopeful interviewee.

She worked as an early-childhood-education specialist for the Snoqualmie Tribe until she was laid off in mid-January.

"Last week I celebrated six months of unemployment," she says by way of introduction, with meticulous elocution.

To keep up appearances like this when you've just gone from making $70,000 a year to $611 a week, courtesy of the government, takes moxie, but that's something Maki has in spades.

The anger, denial and frustration, "all those horrible feelings," were hard to fight at first.

"I thought, 'How long will my savings carry me? How long am I gonna make it?' "

There she was reveling in a spirit of hope after America elected its first black president, and suddenly wondering whether she'd have a livelihood.

Maki, 53, says if she doesn't find a job by fall, she may have to give up the rental home she shares with her adult son. Homelessness is not out of the question.

But it's not just the financial uncertainty, awful as it is, that's hard for her to handle.

If we are what we do, who are we when we have nothing to do?

Maki says that when she'd introduce herself in the past, people would always ask what kind of work she did and she'd proudly tell them.

Now she's come up with a new line: "Marcy Maki, one of the growing masses of the unemployed."

She says it without pride. But she also she says it without shame.

The economy may be broken, but Maki isn't.

Tyrone Beason is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. John Lok is a Seattle Times staff photographer.