What you are reading is my way of throwing my arms up in frustration and shouting

“Fine! Nothing else has worked; I’ll just start writing until something happens!”

I tried turning my interests and abilities into a gainful living through education and applying for work. Writing this feels like creating and firing a flare instead of improving the ship I’m on. As Mr. Spock can attest, that is not a hopeful situation to be in.

I am a writer by inclination, a journalist by training, and a science/technical writer by education. I am also a man of incredibly bad timing: my university schooling began just as the Great Recession hit and the already-few low-hanging branches of a career in journalism vanished from sight. Broadening my search resulted in silent rejection, nothing to act upon. I come from a Midwestern, working-class background and, until college, had been consistently employed somehow since age 12. Prolonged unemployment, in spite of all efforts, is beyond discouraging.

I found myself putting previous interests and activities on hold, or outright avoiding them, until I could resolve the seemingly more important problem of finding work. As you might guess from how similar the previous sentence is to the textbook symptoms of depression, burnout set in. Any time spent not actively working to “get a job” (an often dismissively-used phrase that I have come to loathe) felt wasted, neglectful. I was neglecting my own well-being, impulsively avoiding and distracting myself from frustrations, and allowing my attempts to remedy things to become ever more disorganized and desperate.

Fast-forward to November 21, I made a choice: I would stop neglecting myself for the sake of previous expectations and my failed attempts to meet them. I am in the odd position of forcing myself to engage in my interests because doing so is good for me, rather than being a direct means of gaining something.

It has taken my over a month to overcome a series of obstacles, tedious computer issues, and other complications, but the site is up. I am just getting started here and the layout will definitely change as I get the hang of GitHub Pages, Markdown, and Jekyll. I could have cut out all of this work by posting on Wordpress, but I wanted a challenge, to learn.

Best case scenario, this site will market my employment potential (writing, editing, research/investigation, coding, desktop publishing, et cetera) more effectively than resumes and cover letters ever have. Worst case scenario… I was going to make a remark about losing hope (in keeping with the title of this post), but, come to think of it, dwelling/speculating upon the worst has probably not helped my perspective. In any case, this feels healthier than what I was doing before. For now, that is enough.