I am unemployed. I am unemployed for almost a year. Fresh off the high of a successful grad degree and a pretty amazing trip to India I am ready to face the job market. Boy does the job market want to wipe that smug smirk of my face and punch it instead. Interviews suck. Looking for jobs sucks. The absolute humiliation of spending the whole day in your pajamas, eating chips, watching every event of the Vancouver Olympics and crying every time Canada wins a medal is hard to explain. It’s almost as difficult as explaining the horrifying feeling after 2 weeks of not having the Olympics as an excuse for doing absolutely nothing. Being unemployed sucks. It is especially bad when you’re right out of school and used to constantly being on the go. It’s also bad when you’re living at home sucking all the energy out of your family’s house with your “I’m a hopeless deadbeat” vibes. Your grandma is making you lunch like you’re a 10 year old, your mom is worried about you, your dad thinks you’re not trying hard enough and all you want to do is sleep and watch every single episode of every television show there ever was on DVD. It’s a hopeless situation.
I deal with it quite well at the beginning. When you’ve been in school for over 20 years all you want to do is not think about doing another day’s work again. The pain of absolute nothingness becomes crippling after about four months when I decide actively looking for a job is a good idea and it’s when I encounter the joys of interviews.
The stress of not getting jobs weighs on me. Each one seems so perfect for me and would have provided me with exactly the right kind of experience to further my career. I am so saddened every time I find out I don't get a job that it takes at least a week to get over the disappointment. I only realize later that all missed job opportunities feel like exceptional failures and for someone who's not used to failing it's a pretty sad fact.
I was never a sickly child. The worst thing I remember having was bronchitis and even that was never that bad. Recently, mid-twenties, I’m totally riddled with illness. But weird stuff. Not your typical stuff. So I thought at least. It is funny how people don’t talk about things until someone is affected by it. Once you break the ice about your embarrassing stories, illnesses, problems, everyone else has one to share. It’s nice and also annoying. I have yet to experience anything worse than the complete and utter depression of being so totally knocked out that I, now, 9 months later have yet to continue my life as usual. Sickness and unemployment are so bone-numbingly depressing it is difficult not to express your frustration in some way. I choose to write about them. I know what you’re thinking…First world problems and other people have it so much worse. And you’re right, people do have it so much worse than I do but I don’t think it makes my experiences any less relevant. All of our experiences, no matter how petty or seemingly silly in the grand scheme of things, matter. In the next few days/weeks I'll be posting some of mine.
