A committment to anxiety

This was originally going to be a comment on my post about my perspective assignment in drawing class. You don’t really need to read it to understand. Most of it.

If it takes them a semester to teach you what a skillet is, you’re going to the wrong cooking school. Or you have ridiculously stupid classmates.

Still, I understand. I didn’t say I was quitting. I can be very committed to something, through thick and thin. This happens to be a point where the work is thick and the learning is thin. I am difinitely committed to ASU’s Art program for not less than another year, that is, until I have completed at least one painting class and the appropriate prerequisites. I’m not sure what my criteria will be for continuing at that point, but I think it will have to do with my personal satisfaction guaged against expense in time and money and energy to get wherever I am artistically by then.

Definitively what I am committed to is my art. Whether ASU’s program can teach me what I want to know or not, I am committed to trying to excell at creating art. (This includes writing fiction & poetry.) I hope within the next year to be able to get a handle on a lot of other details in my life. Right now I’m trying to really properly reconsider where I want to be in the work force while I work on learning art. I’m committed to a certain level of expenses for the next 9 months, until my lease is up, and at that time I will certainly have a lot more options available to me regarding cost of living, requirements of compensation, location, etc… There are important factors in my emotional life that seem to be telling me that that may be a time of great flux, as well. It looks like I will be buying a house and taking on roommates at that time (unless a lot of things change in the next 9 months), which would commit me more than anything I’m attached to right now.

To a certain degree I am struggling with something like a fear of committment right now. My art teacher chided me a little for not being committed to the shading. If I get another tech job in a call center in Tempe, or if I ge a job that doesn’t pay enough or that pays much more than I was making before, what does that do to the factors available for change in 9 months? Do I want to put myself in a job I won’t want to leave when I have another opportunity because it’s comfortable or pays well or seems “stable”? What decisions am I making now that might clode the doors to opportunities down the road? If I get a job with which I can just barely get by and I don’t have any money at the end of this lease to move to the other side of town or the other side of the country or to pay for tuition or … so many things to worry about. I want to have options, and I want to feel stable at the same time.

I worry. I worry about not having enough experience with the right things, about not having enough education in the right areas, about not looking right or dressing right or being the right person for the job, any job. I worry about transportation and politics and the economic downturn effecting my sales commissions before I ever get a job I have to get to with politics I have to cope with or commissions to earn. I worry that taking this drawing class that feels like it doesn’t apply much to what I want to be doing is really, really off course from the “making a living right now” course.

Of course, I also worry about worrying too much for no reason. I nearly had an anxiety attack in class tonight. In a class I keep saying I hardly care about. Imagine how frozen with fear I am of actually going out and trying to get a job. Of facing HR people. Of being turned down. Again and again and again. I have friends who have gone through periods as long as eight months trying to get job after job after job and not being able to secure a job until one day they finally do and within days they hate it, or within weeks they’re fired. I’ve never really looked for a job before. This feels like a great weakness to me. My first job I got immediately; I was out for the first time, just picking up applications from every store at PV Mall to fill out and come back with, I ran into a friend working there who said they were hiring, took me back to the store, introduced me to the boss, and before I finished filling out the application I had the job. Zoe referred me to my second job; I went down to apply for a tech job, which they happened to have none of that week, and ended up getting a customer service job that I was overqualified for since I wasn’t picky and they needed warm bodies. I worked mostly in tech departments within that company for almost 30 months. On the day I was leaving that job, before I left the building, I called a manager I had been friends with within the company who was not hiring tech jobs at another. I had the job and started three days later at Realink, the company I’ve just left. In the last few days I’ve called all my friends and it turns out that most of them have asked me that if I do find a good job that pays what i need it to pay, I should let them know. Their workplaces aren’t hiring, they’re downsizing. They don’t get paid enough and they work too hard. Any ideas they have for jobs are because they were already looking for work themselves. I was just beginning to stop being paranoid about losing my job at Realink.

I’ve never looked for work. I’ve barely applied for jobs. I have no idea what I’m about to get myself into. I am freaking out. It’s like a constant, low-level panic attack. I’ve been in a few interviews, mostly for internal shifts in position, and I’ve never been this nervous. I’m told my calmness has helped me get those jobs/promotions, and right now, no interviewer in sight, hardly a company in sight, and I feel like my blood is an acid eating away at me slowly from the inside. I don’t know what to do about it.

I’m not giving up, I’m going to go out there and try to get a good job, I’m just … stressed out quite a bit about it.