The job was everything. It let you sleep at night. It gave you the floor to step upon each morning out of bed. It hot-wired you into the world waiting outside the front door. The job was life itself. The job was you.

And then it was gone.

For millions of laid-off Americans, life in recession has become a knife edge between a meaningful past and a menacing future. Some are starting over in new positions, careers or area codes. Many others are stuck, facing more competition for fewer jobs, questioning their self-worth, up all night and down all day.

As part of a project called Pink Slip 2.0 that will explore the plight of Silicon Valley’s newly unemployed, the Mercury News today begins following the lives of three people coming to grips with losing their jobs: aviation-services worker Kris Rowberry, software test engineer Roopa Govindarajan and bookkeeper Elise Sandusky.

Each of the three, chosen from among dozens of applicants to reflect the diversity of the valley, is unique — the local kid trying to get a toehold in a career he’s been drawn to since childhood. The Indian-born engineer, juggling her professional passion with her love of being a mother. And the laid-off number-cruncher whose spirit seems almost invincible. Through stories, multimedia, an online blog and social-networking tools like Twitter, we’ll accompany them as each navigates the unforgiving terrain of joblessness in 2009.

Will Rowberry’s dream of finding an airport job mean leaving his hometown behind? Will the hit to Govindarajan’s self-esteem get in the way of putting herself back in the job market? And will Sandusky, who had an upbeat interview last week, get a job offer Monday?

In the coming weeks, we’ll follow along as the three scour job boards, agonize over whether to go back to school or simply cope with the pressures of putting food on the table and maintaining healthy relationships with their loved ones.

It’s a world many find themselves in right now. In Silicon Valley, where the unemployment rate hit double digits last month for the first time in decades, thousands of job seekers are struggling to stay afloat financially, even as they veer through an emotional storm of doubts, disappointments and disbelief.

“I’m having a lot of trouble finding that middle ground,” says Rowberry, a 25-year-old San Jose native who lost his job in January. “Being laid off crushes you. You feel like you’re not good enough. Other people are still working. Why not me?”

The software engineer

Sometimes she looks at her kids, the 6-year-old and especially the 21-month-old in her arms, and it all bubbles up: the feeling that she “let them down,” the fear that she’s “not as valuable as I thought I was.” And inside Roopa Govindarajan’s heart it all blurs together: the job she lost, the children she loves and the scary spaces in between.

It ended on Jan. 29, the day after the e-mail from the Citrix Systems CEO echoed a string of buzz phrases now lodged in the new American lexicon like chicken bones — “workforce reduction,” “severance pay” and “outplacement services.”

“I gave the company my heart and soul,” says Govindarajan, 32, a lead software test engineer who started at Citrix in 2006, took maternity leave for part of 2007, was allowed to work part time into late 2008 and was hoping to return to full time when the no-time ax fell.

“Very hard,” she says. “Very depressing. I thought I’d be spared. I couldn’t speak for a couple of minutes. My hands were shaking. I wanted to cry. I wanted to get the pain out of my heart.”

Job hunting can be a humbling and lonely enterprise. For Govindarajan, a native of Chennai, India, the ordeal is compounded by two things: First, she feels the rationale for her layoff was never fully explained. (A Citrix spokesman did not return calls from the Mercury News.) Second, with a recession swelling the jobless ranks, she knows fate picked a lousy time to cut her off from a job she loved.

Govindarajan, who earned an engineering degree in India, has applied to go back to college, figuring an upgraded skill set will help her once the economy recovers. But in the meantime, she jerks backward and forward in a job-seeking existence that can feel like a sputtering engine: On one hand, “I watch a lot of TV, to take my mind off it all.” On the other: “I don’t want to sit at home. I need to pursue something. I need to learn.”

Her husband works full time, but Govindarajan has had to cut back on family expenses and dip into her savings. Recently, she has stuck her toes back into the water. “I’ve started using Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter,” a micro-blogging tool increasingly popular with job hunters.

She’s also trying to network and socialize face-to-face, including with friends still working at Citrix. “We got together for lunch one day, but afterward it was hard to see them all going back to work as I was going home alone.”

Still, there are those moments when she looks at her kids. And even though that nagging sense of disappointment is hard to overcome, “Sometimes, looking at them, I feel hope.”

The bookkeeper

It can feel like a near-death experience, being told your job is over. For 44-year-old Elise Sandusky, laid off Feb. 2 from a San Jose produce company she’d done the books for since July, the end came early on a Monday morning while her computer was still booting up.

“My supervisor said we needed to talk. He said, ‘Business is slow; I have to lay you off.’ It was crazy,” says Sandusky, mother of two grown kids. “I was sitting there almost pleading for my job. I thought, ‘I can’t afford to be laid off.’ “

Just like that, it was over. And just like that, her recovery began.

“I won’t let myself get depressed. I know those feelings are there inside me, but I refuse to let them control me. I have a son in college. My husband works 40-plus hours a week. We can’t survive on unemployment.”

This is what moving on looks like: Up at 6:30 a.m., robe on and hair into ponytail, sit before the computer most of the day. Go through e-mails, hit HotJobs, CareerBuilder and Monster.com, fire off résumés. Maybe drive the area surrounding her mobile home on Monterey Road, jotting down the addresses of nearby businesses, then check the computer to see if any are hiring bookkeepers.

Break for dinner. Then back to the computer once more.

The job search has her sending out résumés until midnight before collapsing on the sofa, sleepless sometimes until 3:30 a.m. She’s applied for more than 1,000 positions, and while a few leads seem promising, she doesn’t want to get her hopes up.

She could worry all day long if she let herself: son Ryan still at home, a student at West Valley College; husband Duane, a master technician for Ford, himself part of an industry in convulsions; the mobile home up for sale, but no offers; the two rental properties nearly under water.

“For now, we can cover the difference between the mortgages and the rents,” she says. “But we’ll get to a point where it’s like, do you pay the credit cards or do you eat?”

Some days, she can’t take it anymore. “Job hunting is more physically draining than a real job. Sometimes, looking at that computer makes me sick to my stomach. Last week, I took the day off and visited friends. I relaxed in a way, but I kept thinking, ‘What am I missing on the job boards?’ It’s always there in my head.”

The aviation technician

He was watching the History Channel on Jan. 2 when he got the text: Kris, call the boss.

Born 25 years ago in San Jose, Kris Rowberry graduated from prestigious Bellarmine College Prep. But after his mother died suddenly from cancer in 2004, he put off college, and was soon pursuing a lifelong dream of working on and around airplanes.

“Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved flying,” he says. “I first flew in a Cessna at age 12, and taking off and landing was a huge rush.”

For the past two years, Rowberry worked as a line service technician for an aviation firm at San Jose’s airport, fueling and servicing the private jets with big-name flight manifests like the San Jose Sharks.

Then he clicked on the text message.

“I thought I’d screwed up somehow when the boss took me into the conference room. Less business in Silicon Valley, he told me, so fewer private jets. Driving home, I was shellshocked.” He called his father, a county sheriff’s sergeant. “Dad,” he said, “I think I just got laid off.”

And that was it. “I didn’t realize how much I’d loved the job until it was gone.”

Yet the memories are still there, high above his head.

“I hear a plane and I can usually tell what it is by the engine noise. I might be sitting at lunch, then I look up and hear a DC-10’s drone. Or a screecher will go by and I’ll know it’s a Piaggio because it sounds like a bumblebee.”

He has joined LinkedIn, built out his online profile and “found a lot of people from my past that I’d forgotten about.” His searches have led to some possibilities, including jobs “at places I hadn’t thought about, like two positions at the airport in Watsonville.”

For now, Rowberry is in a holding pattern, loving his unpaid volunteer work at the airport, enjoying more time with his dad, but aware of how a job loss can tap into a deeper pool of sorrow. “I think about my mom a lot these days. Each loss brings up others. In a way, it’s like they’re all connected.”

The sound of airplanes he’s not working on anymore can get him down at times.

Then again “…

“They remind me that it’s not the end,” he says. “Things are bad right now, but the planes are still up there. I just have to find a way to get to them.”

Contact Patrick May at pmay@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5689.