Anniversary/Thoughts

Today right after I clocked in at work the time clock beeped strangely at me, and when I looked at it it said, "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" It also did this after I clocked out. And I realized that I had been wasting my life away working part-time at Walmart for one whole year.

Actually, truth be told, I've known for awhile that my one-year anniversary was coming up, because employees get a slight raise on their anniversary, and because part-time employees become eligible for health insurance once they've worked there for a year. So you think this anniversary would be a good thing, right? Not when the job was supposed to be a temporary summer gig. Stupid job market.

But in thinking about this inasupcious occasion, I began pondering how I got to this point in my life. And I can't help but be afraid that I may have made the biggest mistake of my life in moving back in with my parents just over a year ago. Well, maybe I should go back in time a little further. Back to when I dropped off the face of the earth, or at least tried to. I graduated from BYU in August 2007 with a B.A. in history. Which is good for absolutely nothing, except for going to graduate school, which I never had any intention of doing. And even if I had wanted to go down that road, developing CFIDS in college made sure that my GPA was too low to really be considered for anything. But I was finally off academic probation and going to graduate. But to be honest, I had never really planned out what I was going to do after that. In the back of my mind I'd always assumed that I'd be married by the time I graduated from college. After all, I was at BYU, the world capital for single Mormon people. That is not to say that I went there to get married, which I definitely did NOT do. I went there to get an education, and I always assumed that marriage would just happen. And after I got there I always heard that the girls who insisted they were not there to get married were the first ones to go. (I am living proof that that is not true.) But after I'd been in college for awhile I realized that guys there are just as shallow as everywhere else and that marriage was not likely. I would have focused on making other plans for myself after graduation, but about this time I started getting sick, so my focus shifted on simply not getting kicked out of school for my abominable GPA, and then bringing it up enough and passing enough classes to graduate.

Well I was finally reaching the end of my university career. I started job hunting during winter semester of 2007, knowing I'd graduate in August. But nothing ever turned up. I was getting really stressed towards the end of the term because I would no longer be a student and also no longer have a place to live since the lease on my apartment ended at the end of the term. I could have renewed my lease, but I had to know where I would be working before I could do that because I didn't have a car and thus had to live near public transportation in the same town as my job. But I still had no job lined up. All the good jobs I was qualified for took one look at my GPA and rejected me, and for all the crappy jobs I'd go in to interview for they would say, "You have a college degree, and you want to work HERE?" and conclude that there must be something wrong with me. I only had two interviews that I thought went even remotely well--one was as a supervisor of sorts over the cafeteria at LDS Hospital, and the other one was just working in the cafeteria at Primary Children's Medical Center. But I was still freaking out. In two weeks I would be homeless and jobless. Plus at the time I was suffering from depression and had been off my medication for awhile. (I'm in the same boat now, but like I said, since I've been at Walmart for a year now I can get insurance, so maybe I can go back on the meds. We'll see.) Anyways, I was having panic attacks, and things were not going well. And I was having to skip classes sometimes just to get to these job interviews which were often in Salt Lake. As I said, I didn't have a car, and I had no one I could turn to for a ride, so my only option was to board a bus in Provo, transfer to another bus in Orem, ride that bus all the way up to Sandy, then get on the train and ride that all the way up to Salt Lake City, and then either walk to my final destination or take another bus there. All of this took about two and a half hours usually. It was really stressful, and the panic attacks were getting worse. I was praying for an answer, but nothing seemed to be coming. I was also kind of upset that I wouldn't be getting to experience the whole college graduation thing. My parents weren't coming to see me graduate, so what was the point of spending all the money on a cap and gown to walk in the ceremony? Plus, I figured that since my lease ended then I would most likely be moving on graduation day. But it was all still up in the air. My parents said I could move back home, but I really did not want to do that. My relationship with my parents has been strained at times, and at this time it was not the greatest. I would get into yelling matches with my mom on the phone, then hang up and start hyperventilating, and then once the panic attack was over I could look forward to the twenty-minute angry lectures my dad would leave on my voice mail. And I'd always sworn that I would never move back home.

But then it happened. I got a call offering me a job. It was as a cafeteria worker at Primary Children's Medical Center. And I made a huge mistake. I accepted right then and there. What I should have done was ask for a day to think it over and then prayed about it. If I had done that, I would have received the answer that, while this job would pay the bills, if I just waited a tiny bit longer, the Lord would have something better for me. But I didn't do that. I didn't consider the Lord at all in my decision. I just went with what seemed logical to me and my circumstances at the time. I needed a place to live, which I couldn't get until I had a job, and nothing else had come up. So I took the job. And then several days later I got a phone call offering me the supervisor job at LDS Hospital (which would have meant more responsibilities/meaningful work and would have looked better on a resume, not to mention that it paid more money). But I turned it down because I had already accepted a job somewhere else. Big mistake.

Well my mom was able to make some phone calls and find me an apartment within walking distance of Trax so I could ride the train to work. So on the day I should have been walking across the platform in a distinguished cap and gown to receive my bachelor's degree, I was moving into a lonely little apartment in Salt Lake City. I thought that my problems would be over then. I had a job and a place to live. But somehow it wasn't enough. The panic attacks were still happening. I hated my new job worse than I had ever hated anything, even though the work load was fine and the people I worked with were nice enough. (I think my mom knew I was depressed and I think she thought I was going to kill myself or something, although anyone who knows me knows I would never do that. I mean, besides the fact that I don't want to go to hell, I just think way too logically for that. I mean, I lived alone, and it would have been weeks before anyone even had any idea what had happened. But the fact that I thought about this shows how depressed I was.) I know now that it was the depression, the chemical imbalance, but at the time I was at my wit's end and just didn't know what to do. I had failed. I had to admit that and then try to move on. So I finally decided to move back to Minnesota.

I started my job in August 2007, and I wanted to give up and leave practically right away. But I had a six-month lease on my apartment, and if I broke that lease they would charge me like $900. So I was stuck there until at least February. I was living a pretty sad existence. I got up and went to work, and occasionally the grocery store, and I went to church every other Sunday (rotating with the weekends I had to work at the hospital). And since I was on my feet all day every day, I was very tired and in a lot of pain, so when I was at home I was usually just vegging in front of the t.v. or sleeping. (Like the time I slept through the SWAT team in my parking lot surrounding the building next door when they had a stand-off with some sex offender had broken his parole and vowed he was not going back to prison and finally shot himself. I was napping twenty feet away.) And I wasn't making enough money to save anything. I was making just enough to cover my basic expenses and pay the minimums on my credit cards. (The only reason I had credit cards that were nearly maxed out is that people who are flunking out of college are not only ineligible for scholarships, they are also ineligible for federal aid of any kind, so my Pell grants and Stafford loans eventually went out the window, and since I was broke, the only option I felt I had at the time was to charge my tuition to credit cards.) I did make one good decision during this time, though. I went back on the Zoloft, which helped a lot. I stopped having panic attacks and did not feel so hopeless. And I no longer spent time fantasizing that I would die in some freak accident, like some psychopathic freak would hijack a bus and then, after engaging in a high-speed chase through the streets of Salt Lake, finally end the chase by crashing into the Trax train that I happened to be sitting in. Yeah, untreated depression is not cool.

So anyways, I was hopeful now, partly because I was no longer depressed, but also because I figured I could move back to Minnesota and live with my parents for just a few weeks or months until I found a good full-time job (which would be easier because I would have a car to drive). It was finally worked out with my parents that I would move back in April 2008 (which was the only time we could arrange for my stuff to be moved). So I moved back. And after about one day, I wondered what the heck I had done to myself.

Okay, I am a huge Seinfeld fan, and at this point I basically became a female version of George Costanza (minus the immoral parts). At the beginning of one season George moves back in with his parents because he lost his job and couldn't afford to pay his rent anymore until he got a new job. So Jerry and Kramer help him move his stuff over to his parents' house, and since his parents are kind of crazy, Jerry and Kramer skip out right afterwards, and George is sitting there with his neurotic parents wondering aloud what he was thinking to do this. The majority of that season George is looking for a job and constantly being berated by his parents, who think that he should be able to get a job with no problem (he does apparently have a college degree, after all). And that's what it was like for me. I came home, and was there, and then wondered what on earth I had done to myself. But I thought I'd get a job no problem, because I did have a college degree, after all. They mailed it to me a few months after graduation. I even put it in a nice frame, which my parents wouldn't let me put up anywhere in the house because it just didn't go with the rest of the decor, so it is now residing in the bottom of a box, like most of everything else that I own. And my parents also thought I should have no problem getting a job if I just looked for one. So I decided to chill for one week, and then get down to business and get a job. I didn't think that taking one week off to relax was too unreasonable, but apparently it was. I felt the tension and saw the looks and got the lectures, and my little sister told me that she was in the car with the parents once when they were just talking about how lazy I was to not have a job after two weeks. And this is not to paint them in a bad way. That is not my intention. I'm just telling things how they were, how I saw them. Well after a few weeks of applying at all the good places and going in for a few interviews and getting nothing, I decided to apply for all the crappy jobs, figuring that I could just work at one of those temporarily until I got a real job. So after I'd been home for about a month I got a call from the Owatonna Walmart, saying they wanted me to come in and interview for a temporary position in their lawn and garden center. So I went in and got the job. Sure, it was only part-time, and it would only last until they closed the lawn and garden doors in July, but I figured that was fine, because I'd surely have a good job by then.

But then July came. And I'd only had like two job interviews the whole summer. But Walmart was offering other jobs to all the temporary people who were interested in still working there. And I figured that at least I'd have enough money to make my credit card payments, so I said I'd still like to work there and they transferred me over to toys. And here I am. Still working part-time in the toy department at the Owatonna Walmart. And still living with my parents, not even having a bedroom but sleeping in a random bed shoved in the basement. And unfortunately, when I moved to Minnesota I lost my health insurance, which meant that when all my prescriptions ran out I could not afford to go to a doctor to get refills written. So by the end of the summer I had quit all my medications cold turkey because there was nothing else to do. And I've been depressed ever since, although luckily I have not had any panic attacks since moving to Minnesota, nor have I fantasized about dying in some freak accident. Although once I did skip church and stay in bed for thirty hours just to see if anyone would notice. (They didn't.) And not being called in for any job interviews has not helped my state of mind at all. It just makes me feel like even more of a failure. I don't think I've gotten a single interview since like October. The only good thing is that my parents finally backed off after my aunt quit her job, expecting to just get a new one, and now five or six months later she is still unemployed. I guess they realized that it wasn't just me, but rather that it was the job market. Heck, I remember reading an associated press article in the paper about some middle-aged guy in Florida who had been laid off for one year, and in that time he had submitted something like 700 job applications and been called in for four interviews, none of which had ended in a job offer, and he was being forced to sell his house and move into his elderly mother's apartment. I also saw this political cartoon that I really liked. It showed a twentysomething guy and a middle-aged guy sitting at their kitchen table with a bunch of forms and papers scattered all over it. The younger guys says, "Thanks for helping me fill out all these job applications, Dad." And the dad replies, "These are MINE."

So that's why I'm afraid that I made a huge mistake in quitting my full-time job with benefits and moving back here. I had a job. I had benefits. Why did I give that up? Things would have eventually gotten better there, right? My goal now is that I have to somehow be making enough money to move out by March 2010. Because I WILL NOT be listed on the 2010 census as being twenty-four years old and still living with my parents. Heck, I will move into a motel for a few weeks if that's what it takes. If I can't be listed on the census as having a husband, then dang it, I am going to be listed as my own head of household!

But still here I sit, in my parents' house, living a meager existence under their household. I mean, heck, when they were my age not only had they been married for over a year, they already had a baby (my older brother Jeremy). And even he was married by the time he was my age.

I just realized that this ended up being way longer than I intended it to be. Partly because I sat down here at the computer with absolutely nothing to say. I apologize. I blame it on the wicked combination of pain killers and cold pills (and I'm talking about the good kind that they make meth out of that you have to get from the pharmacist). My throat is so sore and swollen that I can barely stand to swallow, but whatever virus I have has not affected my fingers apparently, so here I sit, typing away. But I'll stop now. Because most likely the few people who started reading this have long since lost interest and quit reading.