Happiness Is Not A Job

Here’s the scene. Home Girl is sitting on her bed. Her laptop is open in front of her with three tabs open. Each tab is a job description with an email address at the end, inviting qualified candidates to apply for openings. She closes her eyes and takes a few deep breaths. Could this be her year? Her time to finally get that full-time, annual salary job to really get her career going? She could be weeks or even days away from being hired at any one of these jobs. Each one is across the country in very different directions. She’s had to talk herself into finally getting this far. The cons of each location outweighed the pros at first, but she’s been thinking…

Florida isn’t bad. The job would move her closer to some relatives she hasn’t seen in a while, and Disney World would be right down the street. Southern California has that beach vibe that she could definitely see herself embracing. New England has four seasons, and as a Texas girl, she’s never really had a season that didn’t start or end with “summer”. Maybe, just maybe, this could be her year.

Driven by this newfound excitement, she opens her eyes and clicks on the icon that will bring up her cover letter. She also opens her resume for a quick polishing while the cover letter loads. A few moments later and she is satisfied with her resume and clicks on her now-loaded cover letter template once again.

Her heart drops. There, at the top of the cover letter, is the last place that she had applied to nearly a year ago. This job had been so promising. It was exactly where she wanted to live. It was very similar to what she had already been doing full time, but with considerably better pay and benefits. The icing on the cake: her best friend lived there. The job had shown great interest in her. She had a phone interview, a video call, and they even flew her to visit the location. She had great conversations with many of her potential coworkers and even received high praise from a few. She then had an in-person interview that she walked away from with soaring confidence. She returned to her current job with the wonderful excitement that next year she would be somewhere better, somewhere amazing–her dream job.

Yet, that is not how it happened. Losing that opportunity had been one of the biggest disappointments of her life. Everything seemed to fall apart over the next few months. She didn’t get a full time job that year. She had to move in with her mother and worked a part time job to pay bills in a city where she had no ties and no friends.

It’s hiring season again, and the first line of her cover letter seems to be reminding her that she is a failure. It would be one thing if that was her first disappointment, but she graduated from college five years ago. It seemed to be year five of disappointments. Why even apply to these three new places? It’s not like it would change anything. She feels the tears burning behind her eyes and threaten to emerge. What if she tried again and failed again? What if she would get all the way to the end of one of these hiring processes just to be dropped into the “better luck next time” category. Next time had never come before…why would it now?

Home Girl grits her teeth and holds her breath. A few backspace key strokes later, and the failure is erased from her cover letter. A long, determined sigh follows. It’s time to start fresh. She re-writes the text to suit her new area of interest. She calls in her mother to help her word it perfectly. She updates her contact info and saves it to her drive. Time to apply to the jobs.

Aaaaaaaaand the internet dies. She’s on spring break at the family country house, where her brother runs his YouTube channel, which operates on a frequency that her dinosaur computer only recognizes when it’s in a good mood. Home Girl decides to put off applying for jobs…until she realizes that she might never apply if she doesn’t do it RIGHT NOW.

Motivation (and her Honda Accord) drive her and her laptop to the nearest Starbucks, where it thankfully is still open despite the rapidly growing amount of COVID-19 related closures. She orders an iced tea and sits at the only table available. Unfortunately, it’s not a table near an outlet. She barely sends two emails and only completes half of the third before her computer dies.

But she did it. She applied.

Obviously, Home Girl is me. All of this happened this past Friday, (which feels like an eternity ago with all this craziness going on), and let me tell you– I also screwed up one of the email addresses and failed to edit my cover letter with the proper school information on the other. But I’m still glad that I applied. I might never hear anything back, and I’m sure the current state of things will delay any response I might’ve gotten normally. Even though I see no evidence that I will be hired this season, I have to have faith that even if I don’t, thinks will work out for the best.

We have now arrived to my point. I really thought it was all over when I didn’t get that job last year. I didn’t see a future for myself. I had to leave a job that I actually loved to find one that paid the bills instead. I moved in with my mom, which, after two years of living on my own, seemed suffocating at first. I applied for several secretarial and clerical jobs, but didn’t even get a call back. I ended up substitute teaching, which used to be my worst nightmare. And, worst of all, I ended up losing my best friend. In my mind, it was all because I didn’t get that job.

However, as the months went on, I actually began to be…grateful. Thankful, actually. I don’t know what kind of person I would’ve been with that job. I had been applying to music teacher jobs. I obtained my social studies credentials somewhat by accident, and I was unexpectedly really excited about the idea of teaching history full time. As I took more social studies jobs while subbing, I realized that I liked teaching social studies.

Actually…did I like substituting? Did I enjoy this job that I had taken as a last resort? I did! And I still do. I mean, obviously I need something with a good paycheck. I also don’t have health insurance (what a time for COVID-19 to pop up, am I right?).

I was gifted a kitten by one of my friends (and mother paid all her vet bills as a gift for my twenty-sixth birthday last year) and even though she can be a little stinker, she has become the highlight of my life!

I did lose my best friend, but I didn’t realize how much I was clinging to that friendship and how much time, effort, and influence it had been taking up in my life. I began to reach out to other friends I hadn’t heard from in a while. I reconnected with people that I found that I have more in common with now that we even had in college! Sometimes, things need to fall apart to make way for better things. (That’s a How I Met Your Mother Quote, by the way.) And honestly, I’ve found that I’m happy despite losing the biggest pieces of my life in the last year.

My life isn’t perfect, but I think I needed to take a few losses to realize that happiness isn’t a job, or a place, or a person. Happiness is when you realize that the bad things in your life aren’t so bad. The things you thought you needed might have been the very things standing in the way of you becoming who you were meant to be.

Although, I suppose it wouldn’t be wrong to say that happiness is a cat :3