:: door creak ::
… hello?
I randomly woke up this morning feeling the need to write. I made one of my giant cups of coffee and went straight to my old blog. It just made sense… six months later. I also have been feeling the need to analyze why I stopped writing. So (:: clears throat ::) … LEZZGO!
See, I have always had a real problem with pride. Particularly, setting ridiculous standards for myself and not being able to be proud of myself unless I live up to them. I think some of this stems from the fact that I am one of those people (like many) who is good at a lot of things, but not GREAT at any one thing. If you are like this too, you know how infuriating it can be. It turns you into a perfectionist of sorts… you feel like you have to do everything as well as possible because you don’t have that one GREAT thing to fall back on. A few years into college, however, I found out that I was pretty damn good at communications. And at getting good grades. So I rocked my education, hard. I got a 3.8 GPA and joined clubs and led presentations and made connections. And then I got a sweet job within three months of graduating. A job at a Fortune 500 company working on a massive rebranding campaign. And this became my one great thing. I loved my job. I was great at it. It became my rock in my life. I loved being that successful girl.
Then last winter, the company’s stock plummeted and they eliminated the rebranding project that I dedicated a year-and-a-half of my career to. Poof… in an instant, my job was gone. Fuck!
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do at that point. I wasn’t in love with Rhode Island, but there was nowhere else I really had my heart set on living. This set me into a cycle of indecisiveness and a half-hearted job search. Why would I dedicate my life to finding a job in a place I didn’t want to live? But where did I want to go?
At the beginning of the summer, my unemployment ran out. I had been jetsetting and kinda job searching and NOT thinking about it until it happened. And when it did, it was like a kick in the ass/face/ohfuck!alertareaofthebrain. I was out of money. And time. I wasn’t any closer to figuring out where I wanted to live. Enter: The pathetic girl who moves back home at age 24 because she, for once, has nowhere else to go. I can’t stress enough how this was So.Not.Me. But I had to become that girl.
So I moved home and didn’t want to be here, just like Rhode Island, so I didn’t look for a real job. I took a crappy office job at a retail store and just watched the time pass. And here is the big reveal of why I haven’t been writing: I was embarrassed. I still am. I am not proud of myself that I have no fancy job to speak of. That I am wasting all my talents and doing absolutely nothing impressive with my life. I’m really, really ashamed. And that’s the truth! That’s why I stopped blogging… even though I have absolutely HILARIOUS stories to tell about my time at home and time working at a shitty job, I am too embarrassed to tell them.
I think admitting this is a step. But I still feel like my career defines who I am and if I don’t have that, I have nothing to be proud of. That is pretty sad, if you think about it. What about being proud of who I am, in general? Of my friendships and decisions and family and lifestyle and everything else I do? Nope… not good enough for me. I feel that I am not a worthwhile person if I am not making a lot of money doing something important. And I really don’t think I’m going to get over that anytime soon.
So about a month ago, I started hardcore studying the job market in Los Angeles for someone in my industry, at my career level. Just to see… is that a place I could set my mind on? After all, it is where my boyfriend lives and it is sunny and fun and I have a lot of friends there. And I liked what I saw! There is a LOT going on over there for communicators at my level. There are new jobs that are perfect for me being posted every single day. The bad news is they don’t last long — I’ve been monitoring the posts, and they usually disappear within 1-2 weeks, sometimes less. So the competition is fierce. But it is THERE. There are things happening. And I think if I were to go and jump into it headfirst, I could be inspired by that competition.
So I’m going to go. A lot of people have asked me why I don’t just start applying for jobs out there NOW, which sounds like it would make sense. There are a lot of reasons, most sounding like excuses. Maybe I’ll get into it another time. For right now, lets just say I want to get through the holidays and then make the move as soon as possible after that. January/February.
And that’s it! I’ve disabled comments for now, which I know is incredibly lame. I’m just not ready for that whole world yet. But look at it this way… you can lurk my blog for awhile with absolutely NO pressure to comment! I’ll enable them again at some point, I’m sure.
Finally, I’d like to leave you with something funny since you just had to read a whole pile of serious. And we all know this is NOT a serious blog.
So I work at a jewelry store as an office manager (ugh ugh ugh so embarrassed). This means I sit in an office and do a lot of dumb stuff that involves tracking lots of merchandise. It’s boring and takes 1-2 brain cells, max. One of my responsibilities is to ship merch to be repaired to vendors. There are two types of merchandise I ship: jewelry and watches. That is it. For every piece I ship, I file a slip to track it in either the box labeled “Jewelry” or “Watches”. Every so often, a jewelry slip will end up in the watch box, or vice versa. Obviously just a misfile, and it happens a lot since employees are constantly having to look up the slips and pull them out for reference and then refile them. Well, every single time the assistant manager in the place finds a slip in the wrong box, she will come find me in a panic.
“Beth! I need to ask you about this. What is this?? This slip says this is a RING but it was in the watch box! I don’t understand! WHAT IS GOING ON!??!”
I am dead serious. It sends her into a panic every single time.
It’s amazing. I have to talk her off the ledge and explain that someone just put that slip in the wrong box. EVERY. TIME. And it is hilarious to me… EVERY. TIME. She honestly cannot understand simple things like this. I’ve never met anyone in my life before who is 100% incapable of analytical thinking or reasoning. It blows my mind and I’ve started doing experiments to test her level of incompetence. At this point, my scientific analysis is showing that it has no limits. Astounding. I am also convinced that this woman does not know how to read or write and is hiding it. More on that next time.
