Some employers will be nervous hiring people who haven't been paid for their work for a few years. Assuage their fears by offering to freelance or work on a contract basis. If you're starting out in a new field, Cohen highly recommends internships or entry-level jobs.

I started out as a freelancer at CNN.com, writing mostly about parenting. I knew I was auditioning for my potentially future bosses, but I was also seeing how they edited my stories and how they treated me as a freelancer.

A few months later, when a contract position opened up, I got the call. A few months after I was hired on contract, a full-time permanent writing job opened up, and I was already in the building to know what the job entailed (what I was already doing) and what else I needed to learn to have a successful interview.

Don't downplay or date your accomplishments

When I finally wrote down everything I had done in my career, I saw that I had accomplished enough to rebuild that self-esteem and sell myself as a flexible, multitalented journalist.

I'd covered seminal U.S. Supreme Court cases, ridden in Air Force One and helped build a magazine's online community in the early days of Internet journalism -- all before I turned 30. Then I spent nearly three years covering the aftermath of 9/11. I taught the coolest kids in New York how to write personal essays and learned how to write those essays myself. (Those kids taught me how to edit kindly and efficiently.)

While I was willing to leave journalism to return to work and support myself and my child, it turns out I didn't have to do it. One of the biggest gifts of my relaunch is that everything I went through to get here -- teaching, becoming a parent, going through a divorce and making my way back into the work force -- all feed my work at CNN.com. Besides the paycheck and health insurance, that's the biggest gift of my return-to-work journey.