Survival Mode

It has been a crazy year. Over a year now, but whatever.

Unemployment is a bitch.

I finally decided yesterday that I was going to stop applying for jobs, because it was just making me more depressed than actually doing any good. I've applied for thousands of jobs over the past year to no avail.

Or some slight avail - two days of fruit picking, and a month of being paid half the minimum wage at a pizza job. A new website hobby that occasionally brings in money.

I've given up because even though I'm an excellent worker with a good resume, but my visa makes me practically unhireable.

Andrew has no such visa problems, but does have the problem of having very little work experience, and experience is desired for everything, even the most basic of jobs.

If I were Australian, I could be on Centrelink and receive benefits while looking for work. If I were in the states, I could do the same. I am neither.

So what is the answer? Return to my pizza job that still doesn't pay my bills? Look for fruit picking work where I am liable to cut my hands all up (I can be very clumsy like that), all for minimal amounts of money.

I look for website work, talk to people. They sound interested, then they fall through. I've put an ad up for an amateur photographer. I have a DSLR and some RAW processing experience, why not try that?

I've been in survival mode for over a year, waiting for this stasis to end, waiting for something to stabilise, something to respond. But I can't live in survival mode. If this is my life, this is my life, and I'm not going to wait anymore.

No, I don't have a new money-making scheme. I'm just going to live. I may have awful constraints, with no expendable income, but I will find a way to live nonetheless.

See I've been waiting to update as well. Update my blog when something good comes along. Update when there is something to write about. Well, nothing has changed, and I don't know when things are going to change. But write I will anyway.

Although I have volunteered to work in an op shop and to do some medical testing of electrolytes. Stop doing the things I can't and start doing the things I can. That's what getting out of survival mode is to me. Give up on what's not working, and try to actually start living.