I feel like making a fort tent and not emerging for quite some time. I want to roll around in it and laugh hysterically (like
this - maybe even Elmo can be there). I want to revert to my childhood while still being an adult.
It's not that I've had some kind of mental break (completely) or that I didn't do what I said I was gonna do yesterday (I did), but this whole job search fiasco has just gotten to the point where I feel like employers are purposefully not responding to test my sanity. "Yes, you've got the job, but only if you can withstand MONTHS of non-communication first!"
It helps when our parents network for us, when our friends tell us to just keep looking, when that too-good-to-be-true job pops up on Monster.com, but it doesn't solve the problem. We, all of us, still want what we were bred to believe we would have.
Here's the thing: we were told that we could do whatever we want. We were more-than-well cared for by the generations ahead of us who wanted to spoil us and give us a better life than they had. We believed that when we graduated, we would get to enjoy that freedom by exercising our creative talents, becoming singers, actors, Kardashian sisters!
But then these generations of employers and strangers and parents and friends get confused when we don't have the drive to work a job that doesn't nurture our inner-fame whores, our money-hungry appetites. They don't understand why we don't want to work a hard day or why we can't take our time accomplishing our dreams.
Well, we can't do that because we weren't prepared to do so. We were ready to sign record contracts and helm the camera of a blockbuster movie. We were ready to be handed more on a silver platter than we already had been. Even those who weren't so charmed still led a pretty damn charmed life if they were born in the 80's and beyond. They were gonna be superstars in the end, you know?
I'm not blaming anyone, not even the teachers who didn't prepare us, I'm simply pointing out that we're not a bunch of lazy fools. Half of us worked our asses off in college to add another shiny gem to our resumés, and half worked even harder. But now we're out and there's no payoff. We're not getting jobs. We're not getting movie deals. We're not writing the next great American novel. We're not famous, and like the brilliant Chuck Palahniuk said, "... we're just learning this fact, so don't fuck with us."
Don't call us lazy. Don't misinterpret being disheartened as being disengaged. We care. Maybe we care too much, and that's the problem. We want to do what we love so we can be happy, whatever happiness is, and we want to be recognized for how good we are at what we do.
I will always want to make money off of the things I love to do, but I absolutely recognize that it might not be a possibility, at least not in the immediate future. I want to bathe in the filth of that horrendous realization for a while before I force myself into grunt work I will probably hate, but possibly love more than I could ever imagine.
Today I'm gonna continue my job search and play in my yard like a sloppy little 5-year-old, fueled by the vitamins I bought yesterday (adult) and some good old-fashioned carelessness (child).
