Blah

I just want to wake up tomorrow and have it be some day other than tomorrow. Not that I anticipate something terrible befalling me on the 22nd of July, per se. It's more that I just don't want today to continue into tomorrow and so on and so forth.

No, I'm not in a drug-induced stupor. Any stupidity is 100 percent all natural.

I just don't want to keep continuing on this journey. The destination (uncertain and intangible it may be) is worthwhile; I've started from a good place. But the means and the end just don't seem to be suiting me.

I can't seem to figure out much in terms of what I want to do for the next year or two, beyond the highly abstract "find a decent, tolerable job in Chicago and get into Stanford and Berkeley for grad school." But getting there is the battle. I don't know what that decent, tolerable job in Chicago is. Or rather, I don't know if it's available, or attainable for me.

This much I do know:

1) I want to live in Chicago. Colleen will be there, as will be Joe.

2) I want to utilize my research and writing skills, which appear to be my biggest selling points.

3) I want to live above the poverty line, preferrably making enough to tuck a little away for rainy days in grad school.

4) The jobs that combine all these aspects don't really exist. Or rather, they aren't open. And if they were open, somehow I'm not the best qualified for them because I don't have years of experience, or even a measly summer internship or two to my credit because I had to save money for school during the summer and thus couldn't afford such a luxury.

5) I'm absolutely at my wit's end with this.

I just can't convey how frustrating this is. I mean, I feel completely hopeless about ever finding a job that meets one of those criteria. It's getting to where it's not even a matter of settling for something less than ideal; I'm afraid I'm going to have to work retail or wait tables if I want to bring in some income in the next year or two. It's just getting to the point where I want to scream.

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!

That's better. But seriously, it sucks to be a recent grad in this market. And it sucks to have made career plans that don't really involve being on the open market more than a year or two, and only as a sort of interlude between stops in academia.

My fear of failure is very real and at the moment seems quite justified. I can't even get most places to reply to me to say that they aren't interested or don't have openings for me. Even after pestering some would-be employers, I can't get this much out of them. So it's not exactly like I've been lining up interviews and making valuable contacts and coming oh-so-close to landing a job. The whole experience is making me feel like I'm hopelessly underqualified to do anything, and that's not exactly helping matters.

What if I can't get a job? What if I end up living at home for another six months, or a year, or worse? And what happens if I strike out in attempts to get into grad school? What then? I haven't exactly prepped myself for such a bleak scenario, but this nasty sort of self-doubt continues to creep into the back of mind. Counterbalancing that, of course, is the solace I can take in knowing that I'm very good at what I do academically, and that I have nothing but positive recommendations from my professors. Hopefully that will at least mean something for the grad school application process, since it means beans right now.

And so there's not a lot for me to do. Every day, I rise, I check all the listing sites I can find, I prepare cover letters and send out my resume when appropriate, I try to find other organizations, other job listing sites. But what more can I do? I suppose I could try searching beyond Chicago, but that doesn't seem particularly appealing. I just don't know at what point I should legitimately begin to lose hope, since it's a little early in the game for that now.

But it really does haunt me. These worries dog me persistently, and they won't let me feel completely at ease with myself until I can eliminate them altogether.