I'm sitting at the table of the restaurant my partner and I frequent at least twice a month. Swallowing a bite of pesto and goat cheese sandwich, I sigh at my phone.
"One of the worst parts of the job search," I say, "is having to answer unknown caller IDs."
There are many worse parts, like spending an hour picking cat hair off my one good blazer, and the crippling notion that I don't know where I will be living, how much money I will be making, or who I will be working for in two months, but at this moment, the idea of simply answering the phone makes me want to vomit.
I haven't even been a graduate for a full week, and I've already gone through the cycle of complete, unadulterated joy, crippling anxiety, mind-numbing sadness, acceptance, and back to anxiety again.
"I thought you didn't have to answer these calls anymore," my partner says, referencing the part-time adjunct job I'd accepted a week prior. I was going to start in the fall, we were going to move into a cozy one-bedroom that didn't cost ten thousand dollars, and we were going to have a plan. We were going to be settled.
If there is one thing that I love more than having enough money to eat out multiple times a week, it's having a plan. As a kid, I was so obsessed with having a plan, I would write a detailed schedule of all the fun I would have on Christmas. My future plans looked no different.
"But this could be better."
"But this could be better" is a phrase my partner has heard a lot in the last few weeks. It's as though I'm desperately trying to find the loophole that will get me out of the recently-graduated-and-feeling-hopeless-millennial drudgery I've been so fearful of. It's almost like I'm trying to prove wrong my advisor, who told me I would probably have to patch together a series of part-time jobs. It's a giant leap of faith that I don't deem myself qualified for until I'm 40 with gray hairs and a dental plan. It's wildly different from my cries of "I just want something!" I kept repeating just a month earlier.
One of the scariest things about the phrase "this could be better" is that there is a very likely chance it won't be. Out of the few hundred applicants for any given job, there is usually only room for one person. That's less than a 1% chance. Statistically, I am an idiot, and will likely find myself in a shack, eating corn from a tin can*, wondering why I didn't take the safe route. I find myself wishing that if I were to take this leap of faith, I would have a guarantee that a good job with benefits would be at the end of it--which defeats the whole "leap" and "faith" bit and makes it more akin to a tiptoe of logic.
While I've been my usual ball of anxiety this past week, I find that despite the unknown of literally everything, I have found more moments of calm and ease than I had when most everything was figured out. This is terribly confusing for someone who privileges logical choices and long-term investments over anything else, and may very well result in an upcoming "identity crisis" post. But somehow there is security and comfort in knowing that I have the tiniest belief that maybe I am that person who is qualified for something better--that maybe I am worthy of a consistent salary and benefits. Despite not having any answers now, I know that I took a risk and openly rejected the safest option. I will continue to answer those unknown numbers, and I will continue to embrace the unknown.
*I already eat corn from a tin can, so this really isn't an altogether terrible outcome.
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