The Difficult Job Search

The hunt for employment has been a strange kind of learning experience.  On many occasions the search frustrates me to the levels suggested in the above cartoon.  Thankfully, the daily visits to job search aggregates have small moments of comedy: the payroll job that listed ‘sense of humor’ as a required skill and the accounting position labeled as “One Man Wolf Pack Seeking Other Wolves.”  Though this process has also caused me to recognize how important it is to clarify values.  While value is a vacuous term, I limited the word to qualify:

•  Activities from previous employment/life that gave me a genuine feeling of achievement and purpose
• Aspects of my personality that best express who I see myself to be
•  Larger social considerations

These are difficult topics that expand and shift over a lifetime but it is the first time that I have consciously made the effort to analyze them.          

           

Of course, I initially did not view the job hunt as a tool for self-discovery (and I have to strive towards this view on the daily basis).  When I first moved home, I experienced a crushing sense of disappointment each time I thought about a career and applied for positions.  There are probably many different causes for this sensation though the one that persistently popped up was a fear of uncertainty.  For the first time, I had no inkling of what my next step would be, which is terrifying for someone who color coded her high school schedule for fun.  The ideas that significantly propped up this fear were the notion of a perfect career and the role for a creative passion.  It was impossible to find something that matched these rigid criteria in a job search.  One thing that helped me shift my view was The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. 

The Feminine Mystique was originally published in 1963 and helped launch Second-wave feminism.  The book reminded me that I owe a debt of gratitude to the people that gave me the right to conduct a job search in the first place (yet it is important to remember that the road is still long to the true equality of all people).  Additionally, I learned how pervasively dangerous boxes can be.  The core of Friedan’s critique is that women, regardless of their aspirations, are forced to conform to a purely domestic role because of their gender, which is then normalized and enforced from all levels of society.  This rigid way of thinking put women in a box and I noticed that I had also confined my idea of employment.  I forgot that a career can be flexible and usually evolves with a person and his/her/their circumstances.  Hence the reason some people instinctively know their true calling while others gradually piece things together; both experiences have value.  Additionally, people are too expansive to be confined to one thing even if they love their careers. 

It seems that what matters in my job hunt is deciding what areas are adaptable (which values should be prioritized?) and putting serious effort into the pursuits I already can’t picture myself without.    

….And remembering all these words the next time I have the urge to throw the computer out the nearest window. 

Image Credit

Cookie Monster Pose: “Cookie Monster has eaten a telephone.” Jpeg. Muppet Wiki. No Date. 25 Jan. 2013. <http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Christmas_Eve_on_Sesame_Street?file=Cookie.jpg >.