Sometimes, some days, I find myself sitting with other bright faced young people of a similar age, wearing my Vietsuit- my finest piece of clothing, a simple suit tailored for me in Vietnam, a fact which says almost enough about my lack of general haughty couture- and awaiting some kind of assessment. Interviews. Tests. Networking sessions. In these times, I feel an old skin slipping on. -Yes, this is me, too- I think. Amongst my many skins, sides, facets, personalities, timescales. This is me, too. The competent and hopeful bright graduate. Because I sometimes I was. And sometimes I end up in these right seeming places where, surely, I was meant to be.

Sometimes I have great interviews. I build a good rapport with my interviewer. I am never short of things to say in response to questions. I smile, genuinely, with effervescence that is not born from desperate energy. I feel quiet marvel at how I actually believe in the usefulness of my past experience. Sometimes.

Still.

I think in all my life, not counting purely written applications, I have only once gotten through an interview for a job as a first-choice candidate.

One thing I learned from a recent assessment day is that… well. I occupy an unusual and profound niche of uselessness, being a good, earnest person who always did well at school. One of my great problems is one I can’t seem to shake, I’ve always let myself be so convinced it’s a good thing.

It’s like when, for my final project for my Graphics GCSE, instead of making a basic model playground, I made the biggest model playground the school had ever seen, with four differently themed zones with scaled and specialised themed equipment to match each zone, as well as a central raised seating area. I remember a succession of days staying up till 2am every night to get the thing finished. Indeed, at the expense of the accompanying paperwork.

It’s like how, for my teaching assessment, I built lifelike squishy models of heart and blood vessels to use as props in the classroom. Clingfilm and paint over balloons and rubber.

It’s like how, volunteering at the RS, I edited together what I thought the RS should want, not just what they asked for. It took ages.

It’s like how most of my art is. Obsessively impassioned, usually overdone.

Like most of my reflections on what to do and choices to make. Asking so, so, ridiculously much.

My big flaw is that I have too much foolish ambition and not enough restraint. I overdo any creative project in my hands. I feel lost trying to think how to change this.

I did not assess well enough at the centre. -This is not you-

I was turned down for a great science education related opportunity. -You did great, but there was someone else more preferable-

At least I have a job still.

But I feel terribly… terrible.

It’s a new world I’m in, the same old world I’ve walked in before, but I’m different. Yesterday I went and spent over twenty quid on accessories I didn’t absolutely need. Point is- I can shop again. I can eat in restaurants with my boyfriend and pay for the whole bill. I can buy London beer in souped-up London pubs at London prices, among the other bright young things, I’m playing along. I don’t calculate prices in the supermarket and put back items if the cost is too high and the volume of provided fuel too low. I buy cocktail liquers and mix up homemade aperitifs before cooking luxuriantly using fresh herbs and organic meat cuts. I’m human again.

The area where I’m working is practically money itself. The local design, the marble bricks, the green-blue glass, the silvery sides of the tall buildings. Sushi joints and tacky cocktail bars, guys in suits and women in smart coats. I’m not one of them, in my own way I’m still a bottom feeder, doing a simple job in a strange setting. Still, funny, how…

How it makes me think of university days. The first time round, as the end was approaching, and it was assumed inherently that the next natural phase was to enter some corporation of faceless work. PhDs, further degrees and gap years aside. If you didn’t have a career plan shaped in the speciality of your degree, you were good to go for the management consultancies, the marketing companies, accountancy, paper shuffling.

I thought I understood it then, and I wasn’t sorry I’d avoided it for three years hence, including the Imperial year. But it’s taken me years, however, to understand that it actually was a fairly wise move, to choose the milkround path. Because no ordinary person could have predicted a huge recession, and no university student realises how hard it can be to actually get a job. I never would have believed that I could be so helpless for so long. And jaded, older, cannier, more tired… try, then, and find it so much harder to get there. I only got responses from a couple of graduate companies still willing to let me through the first round.

So maybe I look at the suited people who pass me, who are close to my age, and think that perhaps that even *should* have been me.

Anyway, what I am I’m not sure, certainly not the same person I was at Imperial, but I’ll pick that apart another day.

For now, I work, and I spend. People will call spending and working a dead-end job superficial, but for now I call it having air to breathe. Rich, clean, delicious air. A genuine grin on my face, real energy in my limbs, real passions back in my head again. I can breathe, I can breathe.

I finally have a job and can re-enter society as a person living in a city with money to burn.

About damn time.

I’m not a bad person. I just made bad choices for withstanding a global recession.

It’s been horrible being so unemployed and helpless. It’s been full of black depression, loneliness, and resentment.

I think now I can start living again.

Hoo dear. It’s Christmas 2011 and I’m too broke to buy presents.

I really am. I’m quite good at conserving money. I picked up on my mother’s habits from a past generation, and different culture. Buy a bottle of water for £1 while out shopping? Never! Toss out the leftovers? No, just tip on some Tabasco and get eating.

However… my bank balance has reached a brand new low. A milestone has passed. The safety net is mostly gone. So there we are, I actually can’t even afford to buy Christmas presents this year. I’m not sure how much longer I can pay rent.

I have to sign onto Jobseekers’ and also to try and get Housing Benefit this week. HB has become much harder than it was before- the centre is packed, and when I applied last week I soon got a phone call asking suspicious questions about the details I’d given to the customer service bloke, which were apparently the wrong details, and which need more proof, and why hadn’t I provided these things? Not only did I feel like a pretty big failure at life, I also felt like a benefits scrounger. It is also too bad for me that my landlord has gone back to Turkey for the month. The last time I asked him to sign a form, when I think he was in the country, he duly returned it four months later. If I get HB, it will not be for several weeks. This is a problem.

Jobseekers… well… my heart just sinks on the thought of going to the Jobcentre. It probably won’t be a problem to sign on again, but it’ll be, well, brutal to my mental health. I can’t say how shit it feels to go for Jobseekers. I’ve got two university degrees, and an embarrassing amount of unemployed months to my name. I look like the textbook example of some stupid over-educated middle-class twit bimbo. What can I say in my defence? I don’t even know any more. I was so happy to sign off… holy hell.

I can’t move back to my parents’ home. I’m not kidding when I say my parents live in abject poverty too, in much worser surroundings. If I moved back in, there would literally not be room for the three of us in that house. Also, there is no heating, my mother verges on suicidal a lot of the time, my dad’s retired and poor, and occasionally the two of them still have rows which I hear through the plywood walls. Even as an adult, you never get a defence against that sort of family strife, except distance.

I’m doing my best with job applications. I have applied to shop jobs, NHS jobs, TV jobs, office jobs, graduate schemes, tutoring jobs. I have been turned down for a shop assistant position, most TV jobs, two graduate schemes, and one tutoring agency. I need to continue all these. I also need to apply for more volunteering jobs. It is a troubling daily lifestyle. I believe in the advice that job applications should be treated as a job in themselves- but in practice, I am not doing so well at this. I can’t start at 9am and finish at 5pm. I just go all day. Sometimes it takes all day to do a couple of covering letters, so I just spend all day. There’s never a good time to justify not applying. It feels a bit like being back at uni the first time round, when I didn’t have a clue in hell what I was doing and when I was meant to stop studying or not. I don’t know, I can’t stop anyway to stop and reason it out, so I just keep going. It’s wearying. And because it’s wearying, I get pretty upset, and occasionally will be typing away while listlessly weeping a little, like a dripping tap. Actually, the boyfriend has just wordlessly moved rooms because I started the weeping. I wish he was a counselor, instead of an aspiring academic.

I guess this is the worst time of year to be fretting over employment- few are likely to be suddenly hiring over Christmas- but I can’t stop. Unemployment is a full time 24/7 occupation. I’m blaming myself for the fact that my job applications frequency has been off this autumn, because I had interviewed for, and been accepted, for a job in September. Unfortunately the start was delayed. And delayed. And delayed. So now it’s the end of the year and I still haven’t started, and I don’t know when, or if, it will go ahead. It’s true that the security of having that job took the pressure off. I kept looking for positions, and applying, but not as many. I was just looking forward to the mental respite of having a 9-5 and putting my head down for a while. Really f’d up my autumn and now my Christmas, but… if they finally do get me started, well, what can I do? Shut up. Put up. A bird in the hand is worth more than the overdraft in my bank account.

Damn! I just checked my email and found that a course I signed up for has been moved from January to April. That was another thing I was planning my time around. No course in January… means again, I’ve been planning for something that in the end, did not happen.

I’m at the end of my rope, crisis point reached.

My last bit of work has finished. My spate of depression has lifted a bit- I haven’t been feeling as awful as I was before, and not as helpless. Applications are slowly, slowly going out. They take a long while to write. The job I was promised in October or November still has not gotten back to me. Money-wise, things are at crisis point.

Just writing this post as a break from the job application questions. The schemes I am currently applying for ask questions regarding resilience, hardship, academic brilliance, and leadership. I have managed to dredge up some good examples for these. I wish they were not so outdated- these last two years have been quite a disappointment. Some questions are causing me particular pain. Something pretty awful happened in the final year of my sixth form. Something pretty awful has always been looming over my head, as well. It’s a shame, I think, that I didn’t ask for help. Because there were repercussions, and even now, my throat closes up having to write about all that. What can I claim now? That I learned from it? Yes, but… ah, the injustice. What would I do, for a time machine. So I don’t still have to live with it, and have to write it, and feel sad about it still.

Just trying to put together a C.V and job application. I have major anxiety and fear over doing these, now. In trying to construct it, I tell myself- if I just put this like so, and move this section there, and write the golden secret sequence of words in my covering letter, then…

…

then unless you get it wrong, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t have a chance… right??

The prospect makes me freeze up now. A recruiter sent me a link to a job opportunity the other day. It was not the goblet of delicious hope and interest that a job opening should be. Instead it was a glass half-empty with liquid lacklustre with jagged chips in the brim. Nothing to do with the job. It was that a despairing whisper said, ‘What’s the point? I’ll never get it.’

But a person is not permitted to give up, not despite a recession, not anything. I have to roll on. So I’m just trying to redo my CV. Some of the stuff- well okay, 80% of the stuff is getting really outdated. I wish there were not these big gaps where all I did was waitressing or scraps of voluntary work. I feel too old for my level of experience. My CV is more suited to a fresh younger graduate of university.

Still, the main thing on my mind is that my bike got stolen recently. I’d become really confident in the U-lock I kept it locked with. Also the bike was old, and used to have conspicuously awful pink wheels, so was not prime stealing material. Damn. I loved that thing. I dragged it all the way from the West Midlands to Norwich to London. Once I left it locked outside South Kensington station and Victoria Gardens for nearly 2 months. She was a good steed, and the scruffier she looked, the more camouflaged she was, I thought. But the moral is, don’t take your bike to the worser parts of London and expect no one will bother to fetch a tool and cut off the lock. I locked her up outside a station, in view of CCTV, close to the station office. Didn’t matter one whit. I’ve been a fool, and I’ve lost my transport.

Amazingly, it’s nearly December. Getting Christmassy will seem a bit forced this year.

Neutrinos still appear to be faster than light.

l’ve got the blues again, mildly. Maybe I have SAD? But I can have blue days in spring and summer, too. It’s awful. Depression is like someone coming into your head and rearranging your thoughts so that you think differently- and you don’t see why you should think any other differently. Why on earth would anyone wander around feeling sad and feeling sad about feeling sad? What a waste of time. Wishing for an end to the sadness when there’s no magic wand- who are you kidding? What do you want? But that’s how it goes. When my head gets above the water and I see how darkly I’ve been thinking, I’m quite appalled. Still, it’s not too bad, just lingering. I’m still doing my work and functioning okay, so it’s not terminal.

Went to the Synthetic Bio Symposium at Imperial recently. There were some very interesting lectures. I felt like a fraud for being there, though. I didn’t enjoy being back in the College. Imperial is a world that I’m not part of, full of young people studying complex academic subjects with ambition and fervor. I may well be a student again next year, but for now, I don’t know what I am. Jealous of the students, quite a lot. Very jaded and at the same time, terribly uncertain. I don’t have the income to go out and consume in London, to pretend to be living the cosmopolitan twentysomething life. I don’t have a career. Good grief.

This week I…

• Have been plugging away at my part-time video logging job. It was okay until I accidentally read this piece about women working in finance or the City. After reading what each of them earned, I then had to lie down for about two hours, staring despairingly at the ceiling, trying to remember why I had thought milkround company jobs were distasteful and why I had never applied. The things I could do with that money. Once I proudly joined a Facebook group called ‘Hands off my soul- I refuse to prostitute myself to investment banking or management consultancy’. Now? I’m willing to hear negotiations.
• Have been painting a big painting of lots of different animals. I have to say, painting animals is easy. Easy easy easy. No problem doing layers of colour and fur with a paintbrush. Would anyone pay me for that I wonder? How to make it happen?
• Have been finding it hard to make applications. Unusually hard. I bookmark lots of pages and research companies. Then I feel the void of self-esteem, and my lack of success, and ker-plunk. I want to crawl into a corner and stop existing for a while.
• Went in to sign forms for a data-entry job. I passed by one of the Occupy London meets. I felt like I should go join them. But there were people in suits with jobs walking around me. I also wanted to go join them. Not that I’ll be able to. I’m genuinely not sure if I can handle more interviews of that nature. I feel pretty whipped, to be honest. Really bloody whipped. If someone should ask me to justify why I want to work in marketing, I’d only be able to say- ‘Because I want to use my brain and I want a reliable job’. And in my head I’d already be gearing up for the rejection email.
• Feeling very, very, alone. I think the rest of my acquaintances and friends have jobs.
• Looking into other science postgrad courses. I have one offer already. I must admit that the job insecurity of research science, combined with the long hours and incredulously low pay, kind of resemble the rough deal I landed in here with media / science communication. So I need to cast-iron my resolve to do it all. I have a lot of biochemistry notes to re-read.

Weeks are sneaking by.

I decided to spend each week focusing on a different skill or subject that I’m teaching myself about. Last week was Adobe Illustrator. I can draw well, but I never learnt how to draw complex pictures on a graphics programme. Working on it. There are a lot of tutorials available on the web. I’d intended to join an evening class, for the change of scene and the social factor, yet I put that plan on hold in case I needed to move away for the JobIdidn’tgetlastweek. Now I’m a bit unenthusiastic because I’m worried about money again.

This week it may be maths, or Photoshop. Or biochemistry. I need to study all that again for next year. Although the information doesn’t come to mind very fast, I know it’s in my head. Refreshing it shouldn’t be too hard.

By Friday I felt upbeat again, and the weekend was fine. Weekends are always fine- they’re legitimate times for relaxing and enjoying whatever.

I was reading How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. Great book by the way. Certain chapters regarding having kids or not having kids stayed on my mind, mostly because I also have been spending time browsing postgraduate messageboards and reading articles about women in science. Well, I should point out that the major reason I didn’t go into research or lab science after my biology degree was the sheer amount of bad reputation that science has as a career. I knew I had to really, *really* want to do it. I listened to all my university tutors and lecturers who said you have to LOVE your PhD subject and you have to LOVE science in all its horrible, unworking glory. I listened and I thought I’d try striking out elsewhere. Funny how now I still know all that, but it has ceased to deter me. Plenty of other things in life have already deterred me back to science!

Anyway, yeah, babies. Caitlin describes how they basically appear when you’re at the peak of your creativity and confidence and power. Well no, I’m not planning on having any for years. But oddly it made me think of how much time I’ve kind of wasted being unemployed, because I reckon these ARE my peak years. Months and months of lost savings, lost time. I mean these probably are my energetic, creative years. Kind of a shame to let that go to waste in the mire of job applications? I mean my brain is in good shape and I genuinely have a lot of physical energy. What a waste…

Look at it this way. Job applications take a lot of time and they take a lot of mental effort and a lot of energy. You might say that in the last… hmm… five months I could’ve studied for an AS level or could’ve been volunteering 9-5 or could’ve been writing a novel, while doing applications. Seriously, it just isn’t possible for me. The uncertainty, the browsing, the CV writing, the tailoring of the covering letter, the feelings of uncertainty and panic and poverty, the days spent in despair, the days spent taking a break, the days spent travelling to interview, trying to change your game plan, trying to think ahead… it just doesn’t seem possible to be unemployed AND productive. Not for me. It’s like trying to make journeys in the pitch black.

Anyway, back to writing a covering letter. For the record, I’m not opposed to volunteering and I have done it. Working for free (for a company that legally should pay you…) is another matter. I think today’s in danger of being a blue day. I was on the verge of shedding a grudging gloomy tear of despair before I came online to blow off some steam. Away I go.