Updates, answers, and the like

Hello 2013! Excuse my absence from this little blog, I've been quite busy wallowing in the winter weather and sleeping 10 hours every night. Spring has reluctantly arrived and there are a few sunny days most weeks now which has given me extra energy to pour into this space.

Matt is still working for a local company as a quality assurance engineer and he rides the bus to downtown Seattle 5 days week. I was working part time at a local domestic violence agency, but as of April 2nd I will be a full time staff member of the part of the agency that runs a shelter for abused women and children.

I'm absurdly excited (and only a teensy bit anxious) about transitioning to full time. In my mind, this is my first "adult" job because I will be eligible for benefits, accrue vacation time, have sick pay, etc. It only took 23 months after graduating from college and 19 months after moving to Seattle to get here, but they say life is a journey.

I also applied for graduate school in January and finally heard back about admissions early this morning. I didn't get accepted. And while that distresses me a little, I'm also relieved. I had just accepted a full time job and I was unsure of how I would juggle both commitments. In addition, the path to become a licensed social worker isn't exactly a short one. It requires 2 or 3 years in school and 2 to 5 years to get all the supervised hours and then you've got to take a competency test before you're officially licensed.

The idea of starting a graduate program became this huge commitment hovering over me that I wasn't sure I wanted to make, but who says "no" to something they've already said "yes" to so many times? Not being accepted was a reprieve in many ways, but I was also majorly disappointed. Several times I have asked myself, "What the heck? Why didn't they want me? I am AMAZING." But more often than not I have said to myself, "Thank goodness, now we can move back home whenever we want."

I wouldn't mind committing to the PNW for another year or two, but the idea of being here for 2+ more years is stressing me out. I've had numerous anxiety attacks about being stuck here for the duration of graduate school, or being unable to get back to Texas if I became pregnant, or being trapped here by job opportunities we couldn't pass up. Now I feel like there is one less obstacle blocking our path to getting to where I see us in 5 years: surrounded by our support network of family and friends.

When life gives you lemons...

From Google Images

I am a fairly optimistic person, as most people who know me would tell you; however, this period of unemployment has really started to drain my ability to see sunshine and rainbows in my everyday life (just to clarify, I am still extremely pleased that we moved here and with the Seattle area in general). I think if I hadn't started off with two months of chosen unemployment (I was not going to commute 45 minutes to work everyday), I wouldn't mind so much. But going on 3 months of unemployment (only 1 month of active job seeking) and 4 months since graduation, I am feeling antsy and impatient to get back to work. I am ready to help people, dagnabbit!

My entire life I have loved working with children - helping them grow, explore, and learn about life. I spent four years learning about how individuals develop, how community systems should work, and numerous tactics on how to positively influence a person's life. I am eager to put my knowledge to use in a meaningful setting! Is that so much to ask from the job market?!

My sentiments about my future career run along these lines: "I hope to never live a lavish lifestyle. I never want money to be the motivation for the work I do. I never want money to be the worth of the work I do." I have known for quite a while now that working in the nonprofit sector means I probably will never make much money, but I have accepted and come to love this fact. Wanna pay me $12 an hour. Fine, no biggie. Just give me a worthwhile cause!

I am currently on a break before going back to get my masters degree, but have often found myself wishing I hadn't taken a break just to fulfill my selfish need to be useful. The choices in graduate degree specialties overwhelm me because I cannot decide the best avenue for my career.

Do I want to be a play therapist? Do I want to work with normally developing children or children with specials needs? Do I want to be a marriage and family therapist? Do I want to work intervention with broken families and individuals or work prevention with families and individuals at risk? Do I want to be a social worker? Where can I utilize my talents to their fullest capacity?

And do you know what I hate the most right now about being unsuccessful in my job hunt? Feeling like a waste. Not a waste of space or anything of that sort, but almost like I am wasting my prosocial tendencies. It is hard to put an exact name to this feeling.

I already know being patient is my best bet for working this all out (the job hunting and the feeling of uselessness). So I remind myself  everyday "time will tell", "que sera, sera", etc. But frankly, that doesn't ward off the blues quite as well as I would hope. Instead, what really restored my sense of faith in myself was a conversation with a good friend of mine, L. We are all familiar with the aphorism, "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" right? Essentially this means to use the bad things in your life to make something good. Yes?

Over the years, this phrase has received a number of pessimistic and hilarious adaptations, with a few of my favorite being:

• "When life gives you lemons, throw them back and demand chocolate."
• "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade...But damn, there is only so much lemonade I can make!"
• "When life gives you lemons, just say 'fuck the lemons', and bail."
• "When life gives you lemons, throw them back at life and see if life will make that same mistake again!"
• "When life gives you lemons, ask yourself how exactly can an anthropomorphic personification of something immaterial like life give me a fruit?"

But my conversation with L about optimism and lemons went somewhere totally different and completely made my pissy mood worthwhile (as well as curing it). The conversation was something like this:

Me: I am starting to feel a teeny bit anxious that I won't ever find a job. 

L: Oh, you'll find one - smart girls like us always find something!

Me: Look at your optimism! That is totally what I need to get refill for - my optimism tank.

L: Well I don't know if you got the memo, but the motto is no longer making lemonade from lemons - it's putting your foot up life's ass and getting your way.

I am so thankful for great friends who remind me to always laugh at myself and at life. And as the Doctor says, "Rule 27: Never knowingly be serious" (Season 6, Ep 8). Life is too short, eh? So I am going to keep on keepin' on and I believe that I will eventually get it right. Love, love, love to you all!

From Google Images