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.