I feel like I’m being born again. Or, rather, I’m approaching a rebirth. I’ll come out screaming, crying, and helpless, but with more knowledge and contextual fear than any infant that ever existed.
I’m more excited than scared, but I’m still scared. I have been in educational institutions since I was four years old. I went straight from high school to university, moving out in the process, living in a city I’d been to once, five hours away from everyone I knew.
I’m mostly scared because of the financial problems I know I’ll end p facing. I’m in so much debt, and it’s hard to think all that money is worth anything when your degree doesn’t exactly have a “field” and any related careers can’t pay off that money in a reasonable amount of time.
I never had a job when I was in high school. It wasn’t a viable option. My parents’ work schedules were hectic, along with the personality of one of them; so even if I did manage to overcome my depression and anxiety, land a job, and mingle it with trying to stay in school, getting to and from shifts would be unstable. I didn’t work through univesity for the same reason: it wouldn’t have been accessible.
I always feel like a cop-out when I say that my mental health issues have hindered me from getting jobs. I have friends who are depressed, who have bipolar disorder, who have anxiety issues, and yet they hold jobs. They’veee had jobs. They work multiple jobs. They’re doing something that I can’t, and I feel like I should be able to. Like my mental illness can’t be a good reason for not working a shit job at Tim Horton’s or McDonald’s or in retail–all in the service sector, because that’s the only place you can really work if you don’t have a degree and a few years of experience.
But I need to remind myself that I’m my own person, and they’re all their own people. We’re different. The feedback has been unanimous, too, when I talk to them about this: I would be terrible at working in the service sector. I would hate a job like a cashier or fast food cook. I would end up being fired, really, because it wouldn’t be a good fit for me and the company would be able to hire someone else who could do a better job.
That’s a hard concept for me to reconcile. The fact that everyone I know has understood what I’m someone trying to reject: that I’m not suited for a certain type of work–the work that seems to me to be the “gateway” into the workforce. It isn’t like I’m not good enough and that I’m somehow less of a human, or less capable. These types of jobs wouldn’t work for me.
I’m writing this post in my last class. It’s “Introduction to Rhetoric.” It’s okay. I don’t have anything to complain about. Frankly, I don’t have a lot to complain about when it comes to my university career. The one thing I can complain about, though, is the most frustrating: the creative writing courses. I applied to this university, this program, specifically because of those classes. And they were a huge disappointment. I feel like I’ve wasted my time. It’s hard to see the non-monetary value of my experience when it costed so much money.
I’m being birthed into the world again, ignorant of so much, but it isn’t as huge of a celebration or explosion as it might otherwise be. It’s quite bitter and extremely relieving, and I am very unenthused about being done. Well, I’m excited to be done because I’m looking forward to not being in school. But I’m not super thrilled about the “accomplishment” I’ve achieved. I think someone else could have done this experience better than me.
I guess I’m feeling worthless agin. Standard day in my life, even the last day of my university classes.