Stability vs. Taking Chances

I know you've been wondering. You've been thinking to yourself, Ada's summer season is wrapping up just about now, isn't it? Doesn't she usually post something about this time each year where she bitches and moans about how hard seasonal work is, worries about her finances, feels guilty about her lack of creativity over the summer, and in general decides that being an adult is tricky business? The answer is YES(!) and I know you've been wondering where that post is for year 2012. 

Well, wonder no more, because here you go!

Errr, or not.

Although I'm none too happy that the weather has turned grey and cold (why yes, I have worn long underwear to work all this week) and that snow no longer seems far off, I'm actually pretty content with the direction my life will take when I finish up with my seasonal full-time work on Sunday. There's much to look forward to as I transition into the winter season: more time for my personal business ventures of freelance writing and Etsy, season tickets to Broadway Across America (starting with Beauty and the Beast this Wednesday!), crafting weekends and other get-togethers, and a trip to Ireland in April that's almost completely saved up for. I'm rather pleased.

Although I have a hard time admitting it to myself, part of this contentment and security that I'm experiencing is because I am thisclose to accepting a two-year, salaried contract with my current employer. Over the past few Octobers, while I've been ecstatic to transition into my work-from-home portion of the year, I've been plagued by fears that I'm playing it safe, not trying hard enough, stuck at the end of a dead-end road, etc. etc. I've always felt that I have to take a big scary leap into the unknown to really prove myself. I've worried that if I'm not taking huge chances, then I'm not really living the life I imagined.

Then I remember that I'm a go with the flow sort of gal and that the closest I've come to a "life plan" is some hazy idea that maybe I'd sit in an East Coast cubicle as a magazine editor and that maybe I'd like to be married and start having children when I was 27. Since I'm remarkable wrong on both those counts, I think, at long last, it's time to release those hazy imaginings of yesteryear. Things aren't going the way I thought they would, but doesn't make things bad.

So I am not going to quit my day job because:
I like travel and the occasional dinner out
I'm a fan of health insurance
I enjoy being able to save for an exciting place known as "The Future!"
I still learn helpful things from the job and there's room for creativity and innovation
Despite the emotional tug of war that comes from running a business that's not truly your own, I'm the boss. Yup, I am.

You know, financial security is nothing to be sniffed at. Whenever I think that I'm not being very brave or that I'm not true to myself by sticking with this here day job, I remember that I gain more and more freelance clients every year and I've even managed to turn my knitting hobby into a teeny little business that keeps me in yarn money. How am I not being true to myself if I'm consistently carving out time in my life for things that make me happy without falling into a financial tailspin? Isn't that all any of us really want?

There's dissonance between what I think I should want from life and what I really want. If I'm being honest, all I really want is self sufficiency.

I don't need a fancy job. I don't need letters behind (or in front of) my name. I don't need a big house.

I want to be my own boss. Make my own food. Travel when I want. Have the financial security to feel unlimited and secure. Really, I've made fantastic strides towards all of those things in the last few years.

So I'm going to going to take a chance on stability and stop looking at it as being "stuck." Instead, I'll focus on all the doors that have opened and continue to be opened by sticking it out in my current situation.And I'll let change slowly seep into my life.

At this moment I don't feel pushed to take some bold, big move. It's enough to know that I have bold, big moves inside me. Moves I can pull out when the time for taking chances is just right.
 

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Me and the Universe

When I took my current job, I told Andy "Three years. That's how long I give that job."

And here we are, more than halfway through my third season, and I can hear the Freudian slips in the conversation every time I talk about my job. "Next year we'll . . . How I think we'll do it next year is . . . "

Next year, next year, next year.

Next year?? Why the heck am I talking about next year like it's a done deal? I haven't signed any contracts. The year ahead remains an open book.

It's no secret that my current job's potential for professional development is low. As the only employee, I'm both at the top and bottom of the work hierarchy. There's a finite amount that my salary can raise, no matter how many years I'm with the organization. There are only so many job responsibilities for me to take on. While it's not really a dead-end job, it is literally a job at the end of a dead-end road.

And you know, I'm respected and trusted in my job and like any job (especially one that deals with the public daily) there are great days and not so great days. What I'm saying is: really, it's a pretty good deal. It's just not the sort job that you could do year in and year out for, oh, the next twenty years, without feeling that maybe you squandered just the teensiest, tiniest bit of your career potential.

Yet somehow three seasons have flown on by and here I am, still in the woods with limited employment options and I. Don't. Know. What. Comes. Next.

Should I go back to school and get a law degree? No, lawyers aren't getting jobs anymore.

Should I get my MFA or MBA? I don't really fancy taking on that much debt, particularly when I'm so close to shrugging off my remaining undergraduate student loans.

Should I take a government job and relax with (relative) job security and health insurance?

Should, should, should I?

I seem to have a mild obsession with forward motion and upward mobility. But I'm rapidly reaching the end of my plotted out life and the thought of not knowing what comes next is a little disconcerting for this anal-retentive planner and plotter.

It's not that I'm at a crossroads. Rather, I'm barrelling down the freeway and it turns out the exits are farther apart than I'd anticipated.  Kind of like when you're driving through North Dakota, an awful lot of time has passed, but I don't feel like I've gotten anywhere. And once again, I'm dreading the question "What comes next." It's so easy to feel guilty about having an uncertain future. I have a feeling that one result of the Great Recession is a lot of uneasy, slightly guilty feeling 20-somethings.

So rather than feeling guilty, now is the time to embrace the unknown. After all, you can't plot out your entire life on a calendar. Life just isn't much fun if it's lived like a checklist. So in the months to come, I'm leaving the roadmap behind (just for the teensiest, tinest bit) and taking it as it comes.  . . . even if I do find the idea absolutely terrifying.

 

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Behind the Resume

Whenever one month draws to a close and another one begins, lately the radio airwaves go haywire with the latest reports on the economy and unemployment. “Good news on the economy,” they say, every month. Never mind that they’ve been telling us “good news” about the economy for at least a year now.

It’s becoming apparent that at long last, the job outlook is truly improving. For the first time in long time, employees who needed financial security and as a result kept their noses at the grindstone much longer than they originally intended are saying “I quit,” and heading off to the greener pastures of other employment opportunities. But here we are, smack dab in the middle of graduation season and the outlook for this year’s batch of B.A.s and B.S.s is grimmer than ever. How can this be?

Well, when I was in college, just a few years ago, it had become clear that a B.A. was the new high school diploma. Then I graduated and the economy tanked. Entry level jobs, besides ever ubiquitous administrative assistant positions, all but disappeared and the batch of new grads I belonged to were told to stay in school. We could pay off that buttload of loans once the economy turned around. In just three years, as my class played the ultimate waiting game, we turned a master’s degree into the new high school diploma. And a wave of highly educated young adults with very little work experience emerged to give today’s college graduates a run for their entry-level jobs.

Anymore, we all look good on paper. As Lawrence Wetherhold said in Smart People “Students used to be passionate about literature. Now the only thing students are passionate about is getting A’s.” *gulp* Yep, guilty.

I had an ex-boyfriend accuse me of being a teacher’s pet. This wasn’t particularly true, but I did chose a major field that while extremely interesting to me, wasn’t exactly a great intellectual stretch. I worked hard in college, but I’d be lying if I said my GPA didn’t provide part of my motivation.

Still, I don’t have a master’s. When I met up with a friend in NYC in April, we both commiserated about feeling like the whole “getting a master’s is the greatest idea ever” mentality was a falsehood being shoved down our throats. “I want to see how far I can get with a B.A.” she said. Me too! And in order to outshine recent college graduates and as well as prove my three years of post-college life experience as more edifying than working towards a master’s degree, I had to write an impressive resume.

Of course, in a world of staunch job competition, we’ve all learned how to produce resumes that make us look intellectual, creative and well-rounded. When jobs are few and far between, and often not especially intellectually stimulating, we spend a lot of time bemoaning the time we’re losing to use our “skills.” But when we’ve never really used the skills our resumes allude to, the pervading sense of over-qualification in all of our resumes is perhaps our greatest fictional achievement.

Today’s young adults might think of themselves as over-qualified. But in truth, our resumes are just us groveling on the ground asking for a chance to prove ourselves.

But what do we do when our resumes land us the job we wanted?

I have a new job with more responsibility than I’ve ever had before and those icky needles of self-doubt poke around in my stomach. I wonder if I’m working hard enough. I wonder if my competency was just an allusion that I sold to myself a long time ago. I wonder just exactly how I’m going to prove myself.

Most of all, I wonder where my confident, adventurous resume persona went. That girl was really good at stuff.

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