Personal Journal

Is a small epiphany actually just an insight?

What I've figured out is that I'm like Willie Nelson right now: I smoke to feel normal.

I've been smoking between work and school, and it's helpful in allowing me to change my attitude, to release toxic sentiment. And when I say toxic, I mean it. What I'm going through is destructive to me, very destructive. I haven't reached any conclusions on the debate as to whether I'm a bigger pussy at this point in life than I was in other stressful times, or whether these stresses are novel enough that my fortitude need not be called in to question. I am suffering slings and arrows of misfortune (if not outrageous) and honestly at times I feel homicidal and/or suicidal. And the thing I actually do fear is that I'll be somewhere in this super-stressed state and someone will trigger my hostility in such a way that I act before I think. Like the time in the movie theater when I was ready to jump three rows of seats and choke the life out of a teenager who took a cell phone call during the movie (one of my favorite fuck you moments in life, actually, but it turned in my favor - it could have gone otherwise, and I know how close I was to ending up unarmed in a knife or gun fight).

It is the job. It's the job that is a shank in my soul. I've figured this out. It's certain.
it's true I wish I didn't HAVE to do school to get ahead in where I am in life, but I do, and anyway, school will have a payoff and an end date. I have decided to take Cindy's advice and just get through the next 9 months of school and suck it up as best I can, and enjoy what I can about it (it does have some up side).

The job has no up side left, and it's clear from management's words and actions that we're just riding out the rest of the contract trying not to get employees laid off (whereas laying me off on any given day would be mana from heaven).

So yeah, the small epiphany is that it's the job. Which is why I've been scouring the websites for jobs, yet I'm not coming up with much, except additional rejections.

And so another part of this issue is that the constant application-rejection loop compounds the negativity. I have been knocked to my knees, crying while driving home, with the sensation that my career has peaked, that I am useless to the world, and many other feelings that frankly aren't really good to connect with even in this forum. I can't decide if that's true or not because it's the feedback the universe is serving up to me.

So it seems like there's a needle to thread here. On the one hand, I just can't stop looking for work, because if I'm not looking, I'm giving up and drowning here. On the other hand, nobody seems to give a shit about my qualifications, and it seems the world doesn't want to hire people unless they've done the EXACT kind of work that's advertised. And being 3/4 of the way done with grad school means little to nothing to the hiring managers of the world. I have to work within this system, but I cannot let it define me as worthless, and I'm not sure how to handle this struggle.

The short term decision right now is to give up mass applications, and to start focusing only on jobs that I feel highly qualified for and that I would want.

I'm still going to smoke as much as I want, because it is helpful. I will concern myself with dependency and compulsion the moment someone calls me for an interview. I've always had success in the past with that.

It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn