Anxiety in New Beginnings

No real update. I’ve been applying for jobs. I don’t think my final date at my current employer has been set. I told them I’d stay throughout September, but I haven’t seen any progress on their side regarding hiring my replacement. They’ve posted the job listing online, but they haven’t set up any interviews. I wouldn’t think anything of that last part, but my employer is horrible when it comes to finding replacements. They left one position vacant for a year because they dragged their heels so much on the subject.

I haven’t heard back regarding any positions I’ve applied for. However, when I see the listings for jobs to which I applied get reposted, I can only figure those businesses decided to pass on me. It’s very frustrating when I’m apparently their ideal candidate, and I get nothing. It feels somewhat like the recession again. It feels very much like recession in that I’m starting to get application fatigue. I’m so sick of creating profiles at company websites, filling out profiles so that they contain all the information, then submitting a resume that contains all the information I just entered into the profile.

I feel like I’m trying to live someone else’s life, and doing a piss poor job of it. Getting jobs has never been something I excelled at. I remember being 14 when my best friend at the time, Greg, got a job as a bag boy at a supermarket. All of a sudden, he had money, he was making around $100 a week, which I realize is a paltry sum nowadays, but do a high school freshman 20 years ago, that might as well have been $1,000. I was motivated to get a job of my own, so I started applying. While Greg literally got hired in a week, I had to search for a year before I found the same job at a different supermarket. Even at that, his job would let him work weekdays, while mine would only schedule me for Saturdays & Sundays. To exacerbate my frustration, when I shared that I was going to get a job with some of my classmates at school, many of them decided to do the same, and they also found jobs within a week or two, while I had to keep searching for months.

When I finished college, I was the only one in my graduating class to not have a job lined up upon graduation. I’m not even going to rehash on how bleak things were during the recession. The fact is, the only potential job that seemed to want me was the special agent position. As it just so happens, the FBI is accepting applications field agents. Among those prospective applicants, it’s looking for those with financial backgrounds. I think about reapplying, and I get excited. I imagine how I might flourish at Quantico, then all the amazing things I could accomplish during employment. I think about how cool it would be to not dread going to a job that I loathe. I imagine what it could become five or ten years down the road, when I might become a CQC instructor at one of the recruit training facilities.

After all that, I become depressed thinking it might just be a pipe dream. As crazy as it sounds, my cats are what’s stopping me. Training would take approximately five months, and I don’t know how I could take care of them during that time. Hiring a house sitter or putting them in a kennel seem prohibitively expensive. Even if cost weren’t an issue, I don’t even know if there are pet sitters or kennels that could look after them for that long. The kennel is even less of an option because I’d have to get them to a vet for their shots before a kennel would take them, and my current attempts at crate training them are failing laughably. Never mind that upon graduating the academy, I’d have to be willing to relocate just about anywhere. By myself, I could live in an very high cost city, but if I have to afford a house with a yard for three cats, my options become more limited.

Of course, even if becoming a special agent where an avenue I could pursue, getting the job offer would take another three years, so I still have to find another job in the mean time, which means my current about-to-be-unemployed-predicament is still unsolved. In another year-and-a-half, I’ll be too old to apply. I kind of wish such was already the case, so my thoughts gravitate to it so often.