Laid off in March, offer signed last week — the middle part nobody talks about

The two months in between were the actual hard part, not the layoff itself and not the offer. Applications felt like screaming into a void for the first three weeks. What changed things wasn't a resume tweak, it was a former coworker forwarding my resume internally at their company. I want to write something more actionable than "networking matters" but honestly that's what it was.