I think what's wrong with your approach is that you underestimated the difficulty of completely uprooting yourself. In most cases when people take time off, the

I think what's wrong with your approach is that you underestimated the difficulty of completely uprooting yourself. In most cases when people take time off, they come back to somewhere that they already have a network - they call people they used to work with, or went to school with, etc. Or, when they want to move somewhere else, they line it up in advance so that if it takes six months they aren't screwed (eg; get a job that will relocate you, transfer within a large company). You now have two strikes - one, absolutely no network, and two, a short employment gap. I think the lack of network is a bigger deal and you would be having basically the same problems if you'd started looking straight away when you got to NYC.