I've been looking for a dependable, full time job since I finished my student teaching in 2008.
That was six years ago, now almost seven. I have applied, I have interviewed, I've tried to use my family and my friends as leverage. I've tried to appear quiet and obedient, I've tried to appear cocksure and powerful, I've tried nearly everything I can for almost every industry I can to get someone to say "okay." I've even gone into job interviews specifically as an experiment and, quizzically, I seem to be offered more jobs (not jobs that can pay the bills, but jobs) when I go in there and act like I don't want it. I once had the head of a car dealership call me and practically beg me to come in for an interview, but I told him I'd just end up quitting when I found something better... and that still didn't stop him. What kind of Topsy-Turvy world are we living in?
I've had a few bright spots: jobs that were rewarding, coworkers that were a laugh riot, but it always comes back to the money. For example, I could have easily kept working stapling cardboard boxes together, or bagging bread, but neither of those jobs I took paid enough to pay off my college loans, not to mention a house, or a child. My best option, working in the office of an organic farm, fell apart after two months because, according to my then-employers, I wasn't a "good fit."
They even said it had nothing to do with the quality of my work. It was only that I didn't fit in.
I got turned down for another job last Friday. It was a job back in my old high school area at a grocery store. The store was run by a friend of the family, and he even had his daughter telling him to hire me. Unfortunately, the company is owned by another group in another town. Still, I thought I had it good on this one: I knew the owners, his daughter is a friend of my sister, I write for their local newspaper... that's how it's supposed to work, right? Using your connections?
And still, nothing.
As I got back to work at my temp job I tried not to think about it, I tried to laugh it off, but an insidious thought popped into my head before I could banish it away, and it said:
"I just wish I could have been better for him."
"Him," of course, was the man who owned the business I had interviewed for. I noticed, with a no small bit of alarm, that what my mind had just said (and what I was trying to force myself not to say) was the same sort of rationale that comes from an abuse victim.
And, for the first time in a long time, I don't know what to think of that.