i heart fall: day 2

Day 2! Here is the prompt:

Journal Prompt: Today I want you to come up with 3-5 simple, accomplishable goals for your journal. These goals are a great way to keep you motivated throughout this little adventure.

I kept my goals very simple, figuring that if I start simple, I'll be more likely to accomplish them. No sense making huge goals just to have them sit there unaccomplished.

Here is my page.

And a little bit of awesome news. Today I went to meet with someone at a nearby (okay, an hour and a half away) school district about an opening there. And I was offered the job! I'm so excited. This is the setting I never knew I wanted to be in. Seriously, all through school I swore I would never be in a school system. I always just knew I'd be in a medical setting. But here I am, about to start something new.

I'm excited and really feel like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. My current job is just not for me. I gave it a chance for three months, and it hasn't gotten any better. It makes me sad to go into work every day, and the unhappiness comes home with me. My boyfriend and I have been arguing more than normal, and I know it is because of how unhappy I am in my job, which is making me unhappy in everything else.

I don't expect this new job to be perfect or fix everything, but I really think it's going to make a difference. I'm so excited for this opportunity!

...And so nervous about giving my notice at my current job. Eek.

Tuesday Confession

I hate my job.

I realize this is not exactly an original opinion. A good number of people hate their jobs, I know.

Brace yourself for another completely unoriginal thought.

It’s just that I spent far too much time, put in far too much work, and racked up far too much student loan debt to be working at a job I hate. Lots of people are in the same boat, right?

I think I’m suffering from the fear that I chose the wrong thing. More than once. See, I have a completely useless bachelor’s degree. One of those that you can’t really get a job in unless you continue on to [even] higher education. I sat around with that degree for a year and a half or so before deciding to try something else. Something pretty much unrelated. After finding out that I would need a second bachelor’s degree before I would be able to apply to graduate school, I decided to push forward anyway. I got the darn second [useless, on its own] bachelor’s degree. And this past May, I graduated with the coveted Master’s degree in my chosen field.

And I searched and searched for a job.

A big part of my problem--and I’m aware of this--is that I am not willing to move. I’m happy living where I am right now. So I am limited in my search radius.

I ended up settling for a job in a setting I have no desire to work in. I knew that when I took the job. But I was feeling a little pressured to just accept a job, already. Part of that pressure was coming from my ownself.

I thought I would start the job and it would grow on me, and people corroborated this. People in my field told me, “I so didn’t want to work in that particular setting, and I cried every day for a month, but I ended up loving it/liking it/dealing with it.”

Maybe I haven’t given it enough time. I started about two and a half weeks ago. But I cry every day, sometimes multiple times a day. I feel like I’m just going through the motions. It feels like nothing I am doing is benefiting the people I am supposed to be helping.

I’m not getting used to it. I’m not feeling any more comfortable.

If only there were one or two aspects of the job that I could look forward to [other than the paycheck yes I KNOW, yes I AM grateful to just have a job, yes I AM thankful for the good amount of money I am paid for this job, good grief stop POINTING THAT OUT, PEOPLE I KNOW], I think it would be more bearable. But it’s a) in a setting I have never had a desire to work in, b) with a population I have never had a desire to work with, and c) a lot of driving every day.

The driving is partly because the job requires some travel [30-45 miles per day between 2 or 3 facilities, depending on the day], and partly because the job is not exactly near where I live. I have to drive over an hour every morning just to get to the first place for the day. And I have to drive over an hour every afternoon to get back home. That, added with the travelling I do between facilities during the day, is a lot of driving. It got old after the first 3 days.

I am in a position where I pretty much have to keep this job for the next 9 months to a year. Finding a new job would create a new set of problems. That hasn’t stopped me from looking. Sometimes I think the new set of problems would be worth it.

So. I am trying to suck it up and just deal with this job for the time being. For the most part I am doing it quietly. I have a few close friends that I vent to, and of course my boyfriend gets to hear all about it every night. But even some of those close friends—friends I thought I could share my actual feelings with [as opposed to just saying “fine” when asked how the new job is going], have pointed out the things I mentioned earlier: “Well, at least you have a job!,” “Doesn’t the paycheck make it worth it?,” “Well, there’s not much you can do about it, just get over it.”

So I am confessing here, on my blog. And then I will try to deal with it silently. When asked how I like the job, I will lie and say it’s good. Only a select few will hear my true feelings.

Exhaustion

It's so hard to get used to working full time after being unemployed for so long. My last two semesters graduate school, I did an internship at a school and an externship at a hospital. The school internship definitely felt like a full time job, but the hospital placement came at a time when the rehab unit at that particular hospital was pretty slow, so some days I was only there a few hours.

The externship ended at the end of April, then graduation was May 7, and then even though I had a job lined up I had to sit around and wait for my license to come in before I could work. So I spent a lot of time doing nothing very productive. And now I have jumped back into the land of the employed, and it is wearing. me. out.

This is my excuse for having fallen WAY behind on the 30 day journal challenge. And I'm not sure when I will catch back up, but I do intend to finish it. I just don't want to throw something on a piece of paper and not be happy with it because it was done when I should have been in bed.

Meanwhile, here are some things that are making me happy at a time when I'm too tired to be very happy:

1. My new body wash smells like gummy bears. Allegedly, it is Suave Sweet Pea and Violet. But it smells like sugar to me. The other day it reminded me of gummy bears and then tonight it smelled like cotton candy. Yum.

2. I pass by two huge fields of sunflowers every day on my way to work. Last September, a very good friend passed away very unexpectedly. She loved sunflowers. A few weeks after her funeral, I bought myself a sunflower charm to wear on a necklace, and I haven't taken it off since I put it on, the day before what would have been her 27th birthday. Since I was 8 or 9 years old, I've been riding/driving past these particular fields, and I can't remember them ever being filled with sunflowers until this year. It makes me smile.

3. My boyfriend is awesome. He has been so supportive since I started working. He works at night, so I was a little afraid of what it would be like, not being able to see him much. I should be asleep by the time he gets home but I usually can't make that happen; I'm just so excited to see him and talk to him at the end of the day. But I'm afraid the lack of sleep is catching up with me and I won't be able to stay up and wait for him much anymore. Luckily, we still have the weekends.

4. My first paycheck. I get paid for the first time July 10. Because of my start date, this will only be a half paycheck, but because this is my first "grown-up" job (meaning, the first time I'm making more than $8 an hour), it will still be the biggest paycheck I've ever gotten. This is what I went to school for. I mean, not to make money; I went to school to do what I love and to help people. But it's nice to finally see the payoff after a year of "working for free" in my internship and externship.

Finally, here are a few pictures from the weekend beach trip. We had fun, but I was so wishing we could have stayed longer!

Walking on the beach Saturday afternoon.

A view of the pier.

My cutie boyfriend in the ocean.

My view from the sand.

Yep, I could have used another week of that.

The Beginning

I'm starting a new chapter in my life, very soon. As in, next Wednesday. I will finally begin the professional career that I've been working toward for what seems like forever.

When I graduated in 2004 with a B.S. in Psychology, I had absolutely no idea what to do next. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do, but I really had no idea how to get from point A to point B, and I wasn't really the type of person to ask around for advice on how to get to that distant point B.

So I just stayed where I was and found a temporary job, working at a daycare I'd worked at before. After about a year, I found a more permanent job, working as a teller at a small bank. It was a fine job, and I made enough money to move out, into a house with a couple of friends. That living situation didn't quite work out, however, and I moved back home (again) and decided what I really wanted to do was become a speech therapist. Now, how I came to this decision, I still don't know. Which is why I hate when people ask me why I decided to become a speech therapist. I just don't know.

But after another four years of college (2 years for a second B.S. and 2 years for a Master's), I'm here, about to begin my first post-grad job as a speech language pathologist. I'll be working in several nursing homes (the politically correct term these days is actually skilled nursing facility, or SNF), which is not exactly the job of my dreams, but it's a good job and it's what's available at the moment.

I'm pretty nervous. Partly because I always expected to be working with children, so this is a huge change in my expectations, I guess. It's taking a while to get used to the fact that I'll be working with the elderly. Another reason for my extreme nerves is the fact that I don't have a lot of experience doing the type of therapy I'll be doing in SNFs. I feel like I'm going to be thrown into the deep end. I will have a supervisor who will be with me the first week and then afterward will be just a phone call away. Hopefully that will be enough to keep me from completely flipping out.

I'm hoping this blog will be a way for me to vent and write through any frustrations that might come up.