Diligence

I've been worrying a lot lately, for values of lately that include the past 4-5 years. Trying to do the sensible grown-up thing and get a job, to prove to future prospective employers I can hold a job, to obtain educational certification that I am someone capable of doing what employers want. My goal is to be able to move in with my loved ones and also be a financial benefit to them rather than a drain.

So far it is not going well. Three years looking for work, two of them with a fresh diploma proving I am capable of all sorts of things employers presumably like, and about half a year of actually working for people in a volunteer or trainee capacity, and still haven't ever been actually paid for work. It's upsetting, I shouldn't dwell on it. I expect I am doing something wrong, like not trying hard enough or looking in the wrong places.

My watchword continues to be diligence. I realise I can't expect to be 'on' all the time, to always be taking some productive step toward my 'sensible grown-up' goals, nor even to my more appealing creative ones, and that I need to allow for having fun so that I don't either burn out or not get anything done. I harp on to myself about it, but so far I am not very good at it despite having created semi-structured time in my life to work on that balance. At least I can keep feeling like I am getting better at it, and just never reaching my ideal, rather than slowly slipping into a pit of failure like job-hunting feels.

Probably, reporting on how I am going at this balance thing, how well I am managing to both make progress toward important goals and to not either burn myself out with nothing else or to slip off into frivolous time-wasting would help. And help again my goal of writing more online again by having something to talk about as a starting point.

I expect it would be good for me psychologically too, being more deliberate about saying "this has been my project(s) today and this is the work I have done toward completing them". Even if it is just about obstacles I encountered and trying to get past those.

At present I have a job application with a relatively short deadline and I am bad at those. Library job applications are often relatively demanding compared to the generic customer service positions I have been looking at, requiring me to submit lengthy documents explaining how I meet their particular selection criteria. My immediate goal is to create a set of base documentation addressing common requirements, covering as much of what I have done as possible, so that when I see a position going I can put together an application much more quickly. As it is, I typically put in work on these applications over about a week and end up sending them in at the last moment, trying to make them as good as I can.

If I can get these applications in much earlier I hope I will have a better chance of being considered, and if I can write this documentation up without time pressure I can hopefully do a better job of it. Of course I can't quite escape time pressue, since if I finish over the next couple of days then I can put in an application for the job mentioned above. If not, then I can't. At least I don't expect to get it either way. That lightens some pressure.

So I should probably sleep soon if I want to make a good crack tomorrow.