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Sunday, November 17, 2019

Job hunting: as told by Kristen

Preface:

   Last night I had the most distressing nightmare I've had in a while, in which I, while using one of those play games for money websites, downloaded a virus to my surface. I was terrified, especially since this virus was an aggressive one that kept opening up windows and doing whatever it took to keep me from deleting it. It was the kind of dream that you wake up from being really grateful that it was just a dream and you don't have to deal with it anymore.
   So as you read this, keep in mind that I have a surface, and my biggest fear is losing it to my own stupidity.

    Now onto the job search.

Part 1: the anxiety

   The first thing I should mention is that I have an anxiety disorder. What that means is that sometimes my brain will randomly decide that a situation I'm in is horribly dangerous and do everything it can to keep my from doing it, even if I've done it a hundred times with no problem. A good example of this is escalators. I have no problem going up them, but when I was about ten I suddenly lost the ability to go down them. What happened was I suddenly got  scared I would slip while getting on and fall down and break my neck. Ever since then I've been unable to go down escalators, at least in the US (In Britain they give you more time to get on and settle in, clearly I'm not the only one with this problem).
   How it affects me when job hunting is that I'm terrified of going into interviews. I'm decent at social interactions when I'm not overwhelmed with anxiety, but when it hits than that all goes out the window. I also can't do anything that involves customer service for the same reason.
  I've been working on overcoming my anxiety for years now, but there's only so much you can do to avoid the moments your brain randomly decides your in danger for no reason. It doesn't help that I'm not naturally motivated, so overcoming my stupid fear of interviews takes a lot longer than one would reasonably expect it to take.

Part 2: the laziness

    Some people are born ambitious. They work hard, do everything they can, and don't stop until they get what they want. I'm not one of those people.
   Well, sort of. If I don't want to do something, you have to work very hard to make me do it. If I do want to do something, you can't do a lot to stop me.
   Which is to say that I don't really like the idea of working, so I try to avoid it where possible. I hate physical labor, but I'm decent at anything that requires thought (though I'm incapable of writing anything longer than three paragraphs).
   While I don't want to work, I do want a job. Not so much for money (which I mostly spend on notebooks on cheap pens) but because ever since I dropped out of college, I've just been sitting at home bored all day. The natural solution to this would be spending all of my free time in bars or hanging out with friends but, like I said, I really, really hate socializing and large groups in a loud space is my own personal definition of hell.
   So I don't want to work, but I want a chance to meet people. Not to advance myself, but just because even the least social among us gets lonely once in a while.

Conclusion:

   I want to stress that I'm jobless entirely because of choices that I've made. I could have dealt with this a long time ago, but I didn't because my mom felt that it was more important for me to focus on college, (and even then, plenty of people get jobs while in school). I've just been letting my fear of failure hold me back.
   I'm mostly just talking about this as a way making myself believe that this is real, and I guess as a way of pushing myself to find a job that suits my needs and wants. No matter how temporary it turns out to be.

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