I've been unemployed for 10 months now, including 2 months of garden leave, after being laid off from Amazon where I worked as an Application Engineer. My experience there was quite challenging, especially with a manager who had a misogynistic attitude towards the two female members on our team, myself included. Despite my hard work, I felt targeted during performance evaluations, which led me to switch teams within Amazon. Unfortunately, my old manager followed me to the new org, and due to some questionable diversity practices, my reporting structure changed, making me vulnerable to his negative feedback. This ultimately resulted in me being put on a performance plan and then laid off at the end of October last year. During my garden leave, I faced personal challenges, including the loss of my uncle, which took a toll on my family. By December, I began preparing for interviews, aiming for SDE 2 roles since I had some severance to fall back on. Initially, I struggled with interviews, but by March, I managed to pass my first DSA round at LG Ads Tech. However, things took a turn when I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease affecting my eyes, requiring extensive treatment that hindered my ability to interview effectively. Despite these setbacks, I continued to interview with companies like NetApp and JioHotstar, and I felt my skills improving. I had a decent coding round at Google, but ultimately faced rejection. In August, I had a promising conversation with Crunchyroll for an SDE 2 role, but after a couple of weeks, they decided not to move forward, which was incredibly disheartening. I also interviewed with Stripe, but the testing conditions were unmanageable, leading to another rejection. Now, I'm facing a complete drought of interviews, and I feel like my employment gap is raising eyebrows. This whole situation is affecting my mental health, and I'm feeling lost about what to do next. I'm ambitious and eager to get back into the workforce, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.