Katy Jo at Home

Have you job searched in the past few years? If so, then you understand all the dynamics of being a “Full-time job searcher”. Chime in if your experience is anything like mine.

You can’t sleep at night and when you do your dreams are of the places where you envision yourself working. Even before you break into a new position and uncover all the stressors that go along with that job you’re already having nightmares about it. At my last company (a start-up) when things got stressful and we worked 12 hour days we’d have what we call “Zoi-mares” – our subconscious’s literally exuded work.

You find online applications that take over an hour to be pointless because you’ve never met someone who was actually hired because they filled out an online application so you skip most of those jobs.

You forget what kind of job you wanted when you started looking and anything that pays starts to look appealing. Then, you send out a blast of applications for jobs you’d take but don’t really want and realize you’d be miserable and are back at square one.

You write your resume over 15 times because it just doesn’t encompass what you have to offer and looks, well… let’s say not how you want it to look.

You spend 12 hours a day in front of your computer and on the phone.

Cooking and cleaning are very appealing distractions and when you set aside job searching you do other productive things like rearranging your file cabinets or under your sink just because you’re so overwhelmed with the “search”.

You realize how stupid and wasteful of time watching TV is.

Each day you wake-up with a plan and it rarely works out that way.

Your dogs cry when you leave because they’re so used to being around you 24-7 that they get attached.

The upside of job searching is that my house is cleaner, I’m exercising and eating well, my dogs are happier and I have my life’s goals visualized better than before. The downside is, well, that I haven’t found a job!

I know one thing is true. At the end of the day I cannot settle for a job where I’m not doing what I want or working towards a goal that I believe benefits the world because I won’t be happy in the core of my heart. Susan Pinker (the author of the below quote) points out that this concept of doing what makes us happy has long-been seen as a weakness of women but is becoming more widely accepted and appreciated. Whew.

So I’ll take a long bath, meditate, eat fruit and veggies and drink enough water, create a new recipe, play with my dogs and enjoy where I am today. I hope you do the same no matter where you are today J

“Maintaining a close social network comes easily to many women, but until recently the skills required to keep people connected–being a good listener, communicator, and ‘mind reader’–seemed invisible next to more quantifiable traits, such as gifts in math or science. Whatever was associated with the male model of success was considered to have more merit. But now that empathy and altruism are being measured and linked to a longer, happier life, what was once taken for granted may acquire new luster. If most women prefer pursuits that connect them with others or allow them to make a difference over competing for the biggest paycheck, then the extreme male model of work will make them miserable or disconnected, as it did for many I profiled. The fact that they could change jobs to incorporate their wider interests is a benefit of postfeminist Western democracy. The ability to follow your inclinations instead of doing work that others think you should do is a feature of free society.”–Susan Pinker, from the Sexual Pardox: Mena, Women, and The Real Gender Gap (Scribner)