[cyrialize]

I'm sorry that you are going through this.

I haven't gone through something similar, but I think something that helped me out the 2nd time I looked for a job was how valued work experience is.

As a new grad, personal projects are useful because it adds to the pile of things for an employer to look at (along with internships). After that though, personal projects matter less and less compared to real world experience.

(There are exceptions to this though. Personal projects matter less because you don't face real world problems with them. If you have a personal project that gets users, that is definitely something worth talking about).

I recommend just applying to smaller, lesser-known companies just to get some experience. My 1st job was at a small financial tech company that no one ever heard of, and they hired in a lower-cost, non-competitive area. We used a very old tech stack, and had custom everything - that didn't stop me from getting hired at other places.

You should check out: universities, banks, insurance companies, and marketing firms. Applying to companies that are tech companies is pretty rough right now, but you can find non-tech companies that are hiring.

(There's no such thing as a "non-tech" company, but I really just mean companies that don't advertise themselves as tech).

You could also do something like use Indeed, pick a smaller town, and then minimize the miles.