(no subject)

Mar 08, 2011 17:48

Hello, fellow unemployed strangers on LJ. I punched "job hunting" into the interests filter because I'm on my third month of unemployment and getting really depressed, and misery loves company, so here I am. This is long, and if you read all of it, you deserve a medal. T__T

Background:

I'm 24 and have a BA in... wait for it... Japanese Language & Literature. Telling people that almost always results in this response, word for word: "Wow! Japanese! Are you fluent?"

The answer to this, to my endless regret, is, "No."

Interest is lost!

See, when I was 18 and applying to colleges, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had no goals, no aspirations, no passions (not ones you can major in anyway - reading? sleeping? eating? playing video games?), so I picked the one thing I was particularly interested in at the time - Japanese. It was either that or English, and everyone kept telling me Japanese would be the more rewarding of the two, so that's what I did. As it turns out, at least at UMass, fluency in the language is not a graduation requirement. I can speak it conversationally, and read on a basic level, but that's it. I can't, say, conduct a business meeting, or read a newspaper. And, as it turns out, I really don't enjoy teaching. Which is pretty much the number one occupation for Americans in Japan - teaching English. So that's out.

And for that, I paid over $100,000 in loans, which I am now having to pay off, with no job.

This is how I feel about that:

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

I had a job. I was working as a (Kelly) temp doing administrative assistant work at a big-name insurance company. I was there for a year and two months. They have a rule about temps - they're only allowed to stay on for one year, and after that, they can't come back (as a temp) for six months. A special exception was made in my case and they extended my contract for two months because, quote, "...we intend to hire her as a permanent employee after the first of the year to replace a member of our team who is retiring."

On December 30th, I was told that I was not, in fact, going to be hired. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I think they mistook New Year's Day for April Fool's Day or something.

Kelly immediately lined me up with a three-month position with a different insurance company. My background check cleared and I was told that they'd have a start date for me as soon as the company had secured my computer login and whatnot. So I waited.

Two weeks later (after calling Kelly to bug them several times), I finally was informed that the company had decided not to hire a temp after all, and had given the position to someone internally.

And now here I am. Unemployed and with no idea wtf to do. I keep applying to administrative assistant positions but I really have no interest in them aside from, "need monies now plz." I've only managed to land one interview, and I bombed it. I have no self-confidence/esteem and I have social anxiety, so the entire interview process makes me sick to my stomach, and the minute I'm in the room with them, no matter how much I try to prep myself ahead of time, I forget every word in my head.

The Dept. of Labor in my state has been signing me up for all these workshops that I have to go to in order for them to keep paying me unemployment. Today I went to one where I went through the 180-question Holland's Theory of Vocational Choices survey and... basically discovered that I'm not interested in 95% of the jobs in the world and am too artsy-minded to be good at anything. I do love the arts, but I don't have any artistic ABILITY. If I do get a job, it's not going to be something I'm passionate about, and I'm afraid I'm going to get stuck in some dead-end desk job and be miserable for the rest of my life, like my parents.

I would LOVE to try out proofreading/editing, but the market for that around here is slim to non-existent, and I don't know how to get into the field using the degree that I have. I can't afford to dump more loan debt on top of what I already am saddled with, so going back to school right now isn't really an option.

I'm depressed about all of this, and my friends and family are all sick of hearing about it.

So what do you do when you have a (basically useless) degree in one thing, job experience in a completely unrelated other thing, no self-confidence to speak of, and no goal/passion for what you want to do?

introduction, long post, unemployment, temp

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