Drifting
I have been looking for a job since September of 2019. This isn't exaggeration; I have been scouring Indeed, Glassdoor, Book Jobs, and any other remotely relevant portal for a job since before graduating Bryan.
A job of any kind really. I'm not silly enough to think I deserve anything marvelous right out of the gate, but I would at least like to prove myself capable and responsible. I've looked at jobs in the army civilian corps, applied to jobs that seemed divinely inspired, bombed out on interviews (and done well on others).
And the whole time I'm telling myself with each failure that somehow this is my fault. Well, not consciously. Consciously I give myself that wonderful pep-talk that any young person in the 21st century has memorized by now:
"It isn't your fault the economy/market/world sucks right now. Keep your chin up and try not to scream too loud or punch someone. Remember, you're too poor for jail."
Quietly, though, I've been pointing fingers in the mirror. "If only you had studied something better. Like physics! Wouldn't you rather be a physicist?" And then, when I answer truthfully, I feel bad about being bored shitless by numbers and socially awkward freaks in lab coats. "You should want that, Jacob," I tell myself. "Wouldn't it be nice to be someone else who was smarter or more successful or doing important things? Wouldn't you like benefits?"
I thought I'd found a lucky break with my first "big boy" interview. I had applied to Teach for America, a program that specializes in taking idealistic college graduates and putting them in schools way over their head for the good of disenfranchised kids. Allegedly.
It's unclear how much of their program actually works.
My interview started brilliantly. It was a four phase interview with a roleplay teaching situation (I chose to teach Plato's cave), a general information dump, the proper interview itself, and then a period where I could ask questions of Miss "Tita" (her full name was Carmelita, but she insisted on the nickname).
The warning signs were there early in the interview. Nothing serious enough to flag my attention now six years later, but prominent enough that I clocked them in the moment. I politely ignored my worries until the end when I asked one--and only one--question.
You see, Tita had informed me that she had never worked with the TFA program herself. She was a behind the scenes gal. She did all the important financial work that no one else really wanted to do. In fact, this was her first time running an interview and she was super psyched about that. My question was tailored to that.
"As someone who has lots of secondhand and behind-the-curtain experience with TFA classrooms," I began, "what are the biggest challenges and limitations you hear about the most?"
I thought my question was a decent one. Maybe a tad benign. There was no outpouring of heavenly inspiration. Little did I realize that I was about to earn my therapy license in record time.
Miss Tita erupted into tears. Not gentle ones either. Not cutesy emotional tears over fond memories or something sweet like that. No these were full-on, ugly "I'm a fraud and worthless" tears.
Miss Tita dodged my question entirely and launched into a description of how useless and unworthy she felt surrounded by her peers. They were all "so much better than me."
I was, naturally, struck dumb. There I was sitting in my one-room dorm that I shared with a guy named Jake, digesting a greasy lunch, wearing an uncomfortable suit, trying to get health insurance, and soothing a grown-ass Latina woman on the other side of the continent.
A little more research told me that this was an organization I was better off avoiding, so I packed my hopes back up and declined further contact.
In 2021, I applied to join the Peace Corps. I'd wanted to volunteer since I was in high school; it seemed like a natural extension of Boy Scouts. Plus, I can't lie, I really wanted to see the world. Here, COVID did me a favor and cleared out the program, so I stood a chance at getting in now.
After applying, the program sent me delightful little torture notes telling me that PC was closed due to COVID, but to keep wishing and waiting for an invitation to show up sometime eventually maybe. Oh, but don't get your hopes up. Also! Don't make any big changes otherwise you may not be able to go. Just stay right... there.
And right there for a year I stayed.
I refused to make any major changes or plans in my life on the off chance that I would rush home from the restaurant to find my Hogwarts letter in my Gmail. Not until the next spring did I finally decide to give grad school a try. And, of course, that summer I finally got a response.
Well, response is a bit kind. I got a "You in?" that expired in three days. Tossing everything to the wind, I responded hell yeah and scrambled to throw my life in boxes. I had less than three months to get up-to-date on vaccines, get extensive medical screening, and figure out what I needed to know for Albania.
Nothing but chaos. The Peace Corps routinely left important information off of forms forcing me to return to doctors' offices for X-rays or additional papers. They would tell us one thing in a meeting, make changes behind the scenes, and then bury changes in even longer (duller) meetings. When I finally landed in Albania, I was starved for sleep; the doctors there almost refused to let me rest. The regional directors were flabbergasted that anyone would want to miss out on the welcome party and 5-hour long information session right after our 20 hour flight.
I can live with chaos. I can be held in suspension for a while. Clearly. After all, I put my entire adult life on hold for over a year waiting on these lunatics. What I can not deal with is nonsense.
The third day I was there, in one of their endless information sessions, I finally received a little bit of word about what I was going to be up to. We were given a meager glimpse of our curriculum: Freire's Marxist pedagogy (i.e. teaching methodology).
Y'know, to teach English in formerly Communist Albania.
A piece of paper was slid in front of me: a freshly printed "preliminary" agreement.
I had no idea what to do. Years of planning, waiting, hoping had paid off with what had become my greatest success. Finally, I was more than just some nepo pizza kid. Now, I was some nepo pizza kid in Albania on the taxpayer's dime about to sign a document that would not only have me declare that I would happily use Oppressed as the lamp unto my feet but would also legally bind me to Freire's "wisdom."
That empty signature line hungered for my conscience.
I left four days in: heartbroken and alone. I couldn't stomach the idea of stoking big-R Revolution in a country so scarred; make no mistake, big-R Revolution is the end goal of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I finished grad school where I threw myself into writing and classwork. I finished a novel. The chair of my comprehensive exam dropped me because I told a student to do his homework.
And now that I'm graduated, I can't get any responses. No interviews. No acceptance bits. Even rejections have been scarce.
These are common complaints, but come on.
This Wednesday, I sent an email to an indie phone company to ask about the possibility of a sliding phone in the near future. From what I gather, this company has all of twelve people to its name: they emailed me back in less than 12 hours.
These companies I'm applying to? They're in possession of literal armies of employees. These are companies built on the art of communicating; companies like Penguin Random House, W.W. Norton, Simon & Schuster, and these jerks can't find it within their "busy" calendars to respond in a timely fashion.
On May 3rd, at around 2:30, I was out walking. I was off my restaurant shift early, and I had my laundry going. At the corner of the road, at the edge of my family's property, I heard a voice tell me to check out Indeed. Now, I had been listening to a rather good podcast, but I begrudgingly decided to comply.
"Sure, I can depress myself for a minute or two."
I opened my phone and called up Indeed, still set to look for "editorial assistant" jobs. The voice returned telling me to go to page 7.
That was oddly specific, but I followed along. I set my phone to desktop view and went to page 7. Fingers swiped through the page at light speed until a voice urged me to slow down. "Start over; read carefully." Sighing, I obliged.
The third entry was looking for a newsletter writer with a radio show that I loved when I was in high school: The Kim Komando Show. This show was so important to me that when I was 13, my parents paid for a premium subscription so I wouldn't miss the episodes while on Boy Scout campouts. Later, when canoeing down the Alapaha river with my father, we took an old radio with us just to catch the airwaves that Saturday morning.
This was more than just a coincidence. I applied immediately and thanked Spirit for sending me such a clear message.
That was May. This is August. I've sent in two other applications to semi-related job postings with the show, and I even sent a DM to their Indeed portal asking if their had been any progress on the hiring process.
Radio silence. Strict, cold, detached radio silence from America's Digital Goddess. And--to make matters even more thrilling--my connection with Spirit seems to have taken a hit too. Before that interaction, I was receiving messages regularly, and I was seeing plenty of synchronicities and odd events in my life (including an odd moment of telepathy).
My boyfriend, a strong Christian, even relayed his theory that demons might use such opportunities for prestige and material wealth to lure me away from God. I retorted that if it took demon worship to get me a job in this economy I'd take it.
Perhaps the market is too bad even for the demons to rig.
Who knows.
And now I'm left with even more questions than answers. All my life I have relied on my own gut to lead me to the right decision. My actions look chaotic to the outside observer, but there is method to my madness. I look like I twist inward on myself--drift in the wind, but I am testing my gut reactions. Whenever I have acted against my gut, I've regretted it.
Now, there are times when I have acted with my gut (or what I believe to be my gut) that have come back to bite me. But I know that when I don't act on my instincts, I regret those decisions 100% of the time.
Where does that leave me now? My gut has brought me here: careened me away from four different cults (maybe I'll write about the fourth one another time), guided me through writing a handful of books, and now delivered exceptionally specific instructions for finding a job.
I have to trust that it means something: that these experiences are for more than just their own sake. There has to be something about these moments of apparent drifting that I will be able to look back on and think "I couldn't have done this without that knowledge."
But, Jesus Christ, whatever hill I'm going to crest or wall I'm going to break through, please get on with it.