All kinds of impossible!
Trying to find a job.
I’m facing a dragon at the moment that I always thought totally unimaginable. Unemployment. Or rather, unemployment under immense pressure. I’ve done the whole I’m twenty-two and still live with my parents, what do I even do with my degree thing. That’s not this. This is decidedly different. I’ve got real life bills to pay. Rent. Transport. Health insurance. At the beginning of every month, money keeps coming off of my bank account and, quite worryingly, none ever goes in. As chronicled in the last Journal, I lost the chance to accept the most recent job offer I was given. I’ll level with you. This sucks. Of the seventy something proper job applications I sent out, none have been fruitful. I’ve texted people who’ve given casual jobs out before with no avail. I’ve asked my girlfriend, her parents, sisters, university friends and their pets to keep their eyes peeled for anything. I’ve printed out my CV (sporting my Bachelors degree, German fluency and work experience leading a team of photographers at the age of twenty-two) and brought it with me to look for work in the bookshops and bakeries in my neighbourhood. Nos all round. Never before, have I felt like I have faced so many impossibilities. I’ve had worse weeks, certainly. I’m sipping good coffee out of a pretty mug and wearing a pair of new jeans I got for my birthday as we speak. But I feel like Connery in Goldfinger: alive for now, but strapped to a table with an industrial laser ready to turn me into canned tuna.
I’ve faced impossible before. In the eighth grade, I took up running. It wasn’t my choice. In fact, I only turned to running because sport was compulsory in my school. As I found the relative violence of hockey and rugby wildly distasteful, I elected to do the only reasonable thing I could think of: sign up for the sports photography team. I was fired a few weeks later after handing in absolutely no photographs whatsoever. Apparently, I was expected to be at every match for every team, all of which were scheduled before sunrise on Saturdays. After being sacked, running was my only respite. The school went so far as to call it Social Running, as to further highlight its lack of competitiveness and the deep lack of physical competence of any of its participants. Lots of my fellow runners didn’t help the cause. They could often be seen strolling along at a snails pace, chatting and scrolling through Snapchat. Social running indeed. Twice a week, the dozen or so of us would be herded into the hall. Attendance was taken. We didn’t even bother to stretch as we waited. We ran two routes around the school’s neighbourhood each week, one was three kilometres long, the other was five.
I was overweight. I didn’t run anywhere, never mind three kilometres at a time. On my first day out, I tried my best to run for as long as I could. I was quickly left behind. After a kilometre of on-again-off-again jogging, I gave up. I finished dead last in a group of the least capable and least interested sportsmen in the school. It wasn’t a badge I wore proudly. I wanted to run all five kilometres. I wanted it to come naturally to me. I wanted to be the best runner in the school. I longed for vindication. After failing as a hockey player, a cricketer, shot-putter and swimmer, after years of embarrassment at the lack of my sporting prowess, I so longed to be a phenomenal runner. I wished that, like magic, my feet would fly. Like I was always meant for greatness and through no fault of my own, I hadn’t yet found my sport. All of that was impossible. Hell, just running all three kilometres without stopping was impossible.
And then it wasn’t. Over the weeks of mandatory participation, if only as a fluke, I managed to finish a run. And then I started finishing all of them. Soon, I began to enjoy running. A year later, I ran every day. What had once been impossible became everyday. Ordinary. Oddly enough, the idea of giving up on a five-k slowly became the impossibility.
I doubt that the same will be true of looking for jobs. I can’t imagine that walking into a grocery store and asking for work will ever feel easy. I think it always sucks. I can imagine, however, that once I get a job—because I will get one—I’ll forget all about the impossible task of convincing an employer that I am in possession of more than one brain cell. The impossibility I face today is finding immediate work. Looks like I may be able to be a cashier at a organic shop down the road. Once I am no longer bleeding money, I’ll continue to look for work as a photographer. By day, I’ll be stocking shelves, and by night I’ll be working on my portfolio. I’ll try to sneak a run or two in, too, to remind myself that I’ve done the impossible before and I’ll be damned if I won’t do it again. Take that, Goldfinger!
I’m not quite as handsome and charming as Sean Connery, but only just. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.