What To Do After Your Career Goes 'Poof'

Gail Belsky will be blogging for AOL Jobs about her quest to find a new job -- and reinvent her career. This is the first post in her weekly series that will run Mondays.

At 51, I've become both a cliche and a victim of circumstance -- neither of which makes me happy. A cliche because I'm a middle-aged woman who left the workplace a decade ago to freelance from home and raise kids, and who now needs to worm her way back in. A victim of circumstance because while I was doing that, the recession and the rise of social media made my traditional print- and online-journalism career go poof. The editing gigs that used to routinely come my way have dried up; the writing work, now mostly online, pays half of what it used to.