Its been 1095 days since my last job
It has been 1095 days
156 weeks and 3 days
36 months
3 years
or 1095 days
Now I’ve technically worked. I moved to New York and worked at Trader Joe’s for a year and a half. But I still haven’t landed my big girl job. I have still been looking.
And I’ve been looking for 1095 days.
I have sent over 200 applications
half of them rejections
made it to the final round 10 times
and walked away with 0 offers.
It's been 4 months since I last had a job. You’re probably wondering what I’ve been doing with all that time. When I was busy, I never felt like I had the energy to make tik-toks or write more. But now with all this time, I lack the motivation. Without a job or the life I once lived, I have returned to my lockdown routine — where my 9:00 am alarm clock provided a sense of normalcy, the 10:00 bodyweight exercise, and my 4 pm reading session. And while it should provide me with some stability, I feel an unsettled deja vu. Did I ever live a different life? Meet those that I did? Gain a new understanding of the world I live in?
I’ve been wanting a real job so badly as if I was getting a C in a class that I needed to get an A to graduate school. We were taught this. I worked for this. My efforts fall in between my hands like water and I’m left soaked in defeat.
Yet I have paralyzing contradictions in my head. The thoughts that make me want to throw it all away. To fly across thousands of miles of water to travel with nothing but a backpack to my name and the rest of my savings. To have this deep-seated fear that I will only be this young again, so take advantage of my strong feet and agile bones for 5-hour hikes and long drives and late nights. Because I can make money back, but not my youth.
So for every application comes a hovering mouse before the click, every interview a moment of hesitation before excited preparation, a feeling of dread that I wasn’t good enough but wondering if it was meant for me and weighed down by another rejection. Because despite it all it is another job I do not have, and it is another day that I am not somewhere else.
Instead, it is 2:00 pm. I have just come back from my mid-day grocery run to have a late lunch. I’ll sit outside if it's not raining, grab my chair and my laptop, and proceed to watch another youtube video, while I feel the warmth of the sun on my toes, grateful to enjoy such a day that I would’ve missed had I been working. But I am sad. I’m reliving the past, daydreaming about possible futures, and hating where I am in the present.
This is day 1096.
