Wednesday, July 14, 2010

this is not eustress.

I decided to do nothing involving job applications today.

I made this decision because the stress of all this stuff has been utterly palpable lately. I have been grinding my teeth, and clenching my jaw tightly enough and for long enough that it feels consistently sore. I have been generally unpleasant and whiny to an obnoxious degree. And Monday morning, a cold sore appeared on my upper lip.

I am not a particularly vain person, but getting a cold sore, about the one time a year it happens (curiously, I have come to realize, once every July for the past three years), makes me utterly miserable. It is an aesthetic wake-up call. I can think about almost nothing else. When I speak to others, I envision myself reflected as not a human with a cold sore, but as a leper, a bleeding, oozing, warty, oily, physical manifestation of disease and horror. Yes; it is actually almost this dramatic. I stay inside as much as possible and avoid human contact. I apply miracle goop hourly. Right now that's Abreva, which promises to speed healing time and claims a median healing time of 4.1 days (key word median and not average). It seems to actually be working. Tomorrow is Day 3.

I am the sort of person, I have realized, who is less stressed by actual, stressful, targeted events than by much grander, more complicated things. For example, I can handle having two midterms within a week. It will create manageable stress. I can handle the first day of an internship, the first date, the awkward family reunion. I might be a little sweaty and uncomfortable, but I know the parameters.

But the state of my life right now? Few stressful scenarios, but plenty of omnipresent, existentially torturous stress.

Let's take an inventory:

-Just graduated from an excellent university, with honors, but jobless.
-Although not completely jobless. I have the extension of my unimpressive, tedious library job throughout the summer. I do one of the same, like, seven repetitive tasks every day. I look at the clock frequently and end the day exhausted. This job expires at the end of the summer.
-With my remaining time, despite being exhausted, have tried to work on resume and cover letters and have been edited and edited and edited. Feel paralyzed in my approach to any job. Motivation feels beyond my capability right now.
-Lease ends September 1. No concrete plan for a living situation after this.
-Unstable, casual relationship with adorable Frenchman. (Usually, a drain on stress. Unless we have a fight because he tells me I "move a lot" at night which disrupts his precious sleep, which prompts me to ask "Do you even want me in your bed? Why are you even dating me?" and crawl out of his bed and prepare to leave while he says, looking perplexed, "I think this is a misunderstanding...")

I have no idea what I'm doing. It's like I'm navigating my way through a dark hallway and doing everything wrong. I want to apply for jobs but it's unbelievably time-consuming, and I can barely pull together a decent phrasing to prevent my poor, beleaguered application materials from being thrown in the trash.

Mostly, though, I see discrepancies between who I am and who I want to be. I am uninspired, terrified, apparently talentless, somewhat spineless, and without a plan. Clearly without confidence. I am unrecognizable to myself. I am envisioning a future unfolding, a future of jobs I don't care about, jobs I would take anyway because they would have me. Jobs like the one I have now, where I would spend all my time looking at the clock, contributing in pointless and tedious ways to something I ultimately don't really care about. Being a cog in a machine: always replaceable.

This is the great, horrific existential stress weighing on me. It is literally my future. And it is here. I am paralyzed in the headlights of my future.

2 comments:

Connie said...

Hey, we need to hang out. We'll go to somewhere, talk about it, and you're going to come out feeling better and having a better attitude.

You know it.

Claire said...

<3 I know. I am trying to be responsible and not spend money; dinner at your/my place this week? Tuesday/Wednesday?