It's those pesky few months that begin somewhere around the time when you hit second semester of your senior year of college. You start applying to jobs. You start playing dress-up with "Big Girl Job" clothes. Everything from Hooters to Starbucks are suddenly deemed potential job options, unless you have exhausted all (and I mean all) other possibilities. “Executive Assistant” is pretty much all you feel qualified for most of the time, based on the number of call-backs you get from the 9873537485793 companies to which you apply. (Zero.) I remember; I was an English major…and no one could have cared less that I spent an entire year thoroughly dissecting the histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances in Shakespeare’s repertoire. Or that I could write an A+ paper on how screwed up my childhood was. This is when you realize you have to learn the art of marketing yourself, which is NO easy task.
Questions creep up. Sometimes they're healthy questions but, all too often, these questions are your demise. We're supposed to know everything before we've so much as dipped one toe in the big pool of the messiness that we call adulthood. It's what I refer to as the “Athena Dilemma.” Except, unlike Athena, young women are expected to “sprout” out of college, so to speak, fully-formed and with a level of expertise for navigating toward a career so beyond our comprehension, it’s like forcing an newly hatched bird to soar gracefully from one coast to another. It just isn't gonna work...We don’t know how to use our damn wings yet.
Somewhere amidst the myriad of other obligations that occupied every corner of our lives while in college, we were supposed to have concocted a brilliant resume, secured airtight references, figured out how the hell to write a good cover letter, and, worst of all, honed our interview skills until they’re pencil-tip sharp.
I did all of these things.
It has been one of the most anxiety-ridden, tear-inducing rollercoaster rides of my life, causing types of confusion, frustration, and disappointment I didn’t even know I had the capacity to feel. But the tidal wave that I didn’t see coming would literally shake me to the core and cause all of these emotions to come back sevenfold, plus some new ones.
I come to you now as someone who’s been spit out of the corporate machine after holding a college graduate’s dream job just shy of a year.
Yup, I got fired.
And now I’m starting over…
