I've been largely unemployed again since my last job, working for
Miss Green as a gardener, came to an end last May. She died quite suddenly but
not completely unexpectedly - she was 96, but had been my excellent, feisty,
but supportive and respectful employer for 10 years - more or less the same
period I'd been with my ex and living in her house in Henfield. It was the most
settled period of my entire life since I left home. In some ways it was worse
than the end of my marriage, partly because I've never been so financially
secure and partly because Miss Green and I got on so well.
Anyway, on top of
the bereavement there was the simple matter of being unemployed again - a state
I absolutely loathe - not because of the poverty (I can survive on surprisingly
little) or the boredom (I have plenty to be getting on with) but simply because
I do need at least some money - not much, but some - and sooner or later I need
to set about finding someone to pay me to do something.
This is what I hate - job-hunting. It is my single most hated
thing ever in life. I have no problem with public speaking (as long as I feel I
know what I'm talking about) I wouldn't mind taking my clothes off in public. I
might even prefer singing a solo (I might even be quite good at it). I'd sit my
A levels again if I had to. But I hate job hunting. It has a power to make me
feel wretched that nothing else does. It's not the interview - if I get an interview
I'm generally ok - it’s the searching part - it's the trawling through all
those uninspiring and often incomprehensible job descriptions (could they
possibly make them seem less worth having?) or trying to locate likely looking
employers and sending out cvs and covering letters to people who really aren’t
interested and probably have someone very different in mind. I strongly suspect
that even if a job sounds vaguely within my powers, that it'll be long hours
for little return, probably working with people I can't relate to, for some
greedy autocratic turd of a man doing something that means nothing to me, and I’ll
end up messing it up in some way.
I’m aware that my
perception of The World of Work" is a little mad (I never said my feelings
about all this were entirely rational) but one thing I have always fought
against is the notion that I am simply lazy - that I just don’t want to work
and can’t be bothered even to try. It’s not as simple as that. I love having a
real job to do - something I can really get into and do well. I work very hard
and actually have trouble pacing myself so I may end up with a migraine the
next day.
I try to explain the problem to people but it’s like saying ‘I
simply can’t walk. I just don’t seem to be able to work out how do it.’ They
just sort of look at me like I’m a moron. It’s something they take for granted
that people do (or in a few cases something they’ve actively chosen not to do,
even though they could if they wanted to). Sure they don’t necessarily have
great jobs, or much money, but they always assume they will be able to get some
sort of job and earn something when they need to, and they have holidays and
children and gadgets and little treats. As it happens almost all of them are on
quite a bit higher wages than I was content with, working part-time for Miss
Green (about £15000pa before tax). It’s just something they do - and from a
young age. My ex told me - when she wanted something or other when she was in
her mid-teens she got a job at the local kennels and lo and behold by the end
of the summer she had the money to buy whatever it was she’d wanted. I know
many of my contemporaries just worked long hours doing pretty much anything all
summer so they could travel, or for driving lessons or whatever. I could never
do that - the idea of ‘wasting’ a whole summer doing something miserable so
that maybe, at the end of it, I’d have saved enough money to go away for a
while just seemed impossibly risky. To me, money wasn’t like that - you couldn’t
trust it. Unexpected problems came along, or things happened and lo and behold
by the end of the summer you’d spent the time bored out of your mind in some
dingy factory or shop and still somehow had almost nothing to show for it. I
just didn’t trust the whole work/wages process. It just didn’t seem very
realistic, especially when I could stay home - walk in the country, do stuff
with my hobbies, or just live in my imagination, using the resources and
knowledge I already had. Having to put up with my parents’ disappointment and going
to the benefit office once a fortnight were bad but a doddle by comparison.
Now I don’t know where this fairly extreme distrust of The World
of Work comes from. It must come from somewhere - this sense that it is futile
and humiliating, and a part of me knows it’s not really true. I sort of know that.
But a fairly powerful part of me is not convinced. The thought of having to go
through all that - the trawling through the sits vac, the trying to write
something that sounds like I really really want to do whatever they want for
whatever money they deign to give me - the humiliation of having to justify my patchy
CV. It’s just all too depressing, and as I said, probably futile. Probably
nothing will come of it.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The problem is actually a bit broader than just job hunting. The anticipation
of humiliation is specific to that pursuit but the feeling of futility extends
to many areas of life - reading instructions or legal documents, shopping
around for utilities providers or insurance, electrical goods or cars. Even
just trying to get organised to face all these things brings out that same
feeling of lostness and pointlessness in the face of all this…. crap. And I go
back into my own space, doing what I know I can do, with the resources and
skills I have. Anything I might achieve is down to serendipity and impulse.
I wrote a lot of stuff about this feeling in my notebook recently -
about how it feels to be faced with my to-do list of a morning - after I’ve had
my coffee and toast and begun to feel that I’ve done whatever there is to do with
my emails, Facebook and Flickr and I begin to get that nagging feeling that I should
be ‘getting on with something’. And yet I don’t - possibly for another hour
yet.
I hate the word ‘procrastination’ because it sounds like laziness
and weakness but something Mike the CBT Guy gave me said first up that ‘procrastination
is not laziness’ - it has nothing to do with can’t-be-bothered. It’s a strategy
for avoiding things that upset us - things we can’t face - things, ultimately,
that we’re afraid of.
Procrastination is in fact a perfectly logical response to fear.
But fear of what? I’m actually not sure but the feeling is of being overwhelmed
- it’s a feeling of bewilderment and confusion - it’s a fear of being
hopelessly lost and muddled, of taking too long and getting left behind, of letting
people down, of being an embarrassment and a disappointment, of being ridiculed,
of being contemptible and untrustworthy. It causes a kind of panic - an inability
to look at what is to be done and come up with any kind of strategy. It’s
impossible to think about how long things might take or how one thing might
affect another - it’s all too complicated - impossible to make a decision. This
is the tearfulness I feel when I’m depressed and the frustration and the fury I
feel when I know I bloody well should just be able to just get it done, like
everyone else does. Better to just avoid it and hope it won’t be necessary somehow,
or just dash it off at the last minute without looking back. Get it out the way
- forget about it. No wonder I procrastinate. It makes perfect sense.
????????????????????????????????
I was listening to something on the radio about dyspraxia. I hate the
medicalisation of personality traits but some of what they were saying sounded
sort of like what I’m talking about here. Mostly dyspraxia seems to be about
some sort of neurological deficit, like dyslexia or dyscalculia, when people
look at a sentence or a sum and simply can’t make sense of it. Whereas for most
people it would signify something, for these people it just looks like a string
of meaningless symbols. I’m not dyslexic but maths is like that for me. I look
at an equation and it means nothing - I did a bit of oceanography at uni and
there’s a lot of physics and a lot of equations - I had to keep looking to see
what the symbols meant (how can you multiply time by pressure? What does that
even mean?) But many people look at a dyslexic and think she’s just not trying
hard enough. That’s how I feel and I don’t even have a name for what I’m going
through. Dyspraxia seems to be close but more about some kind of basic inability
to see things in relation to each other, to understand patterns - spatial relationships
etc, so dyspraxics tend to be clumsy and disorganised. I’m not especially
clumsy unless I’m tired. It feels like maybe the word is trying to cover too
many different things, but anyway I can relate to part of it. I look at my
to-do list and I don’t know where to start and I feel wretched.
Actually things have moved on a little from there. A long time
ago, during my first stint at Uni (or Brighton Poly actually) I went through a
sort of crisis over deadlines - they used to keep me awake all night - worrying
about what might go wrong and how I might mess them up. And then at some point I
looked back at what I’d done so far and realised that I’d actually got all my
assignments in on time and got good marks and I said to myself ‘I’ll manage’
and it became a sort of mantra and I did manage - I never handed work in late
and always got decent marks. But I think the difference there was that it was a
strict, externally imposed deadline, and only having to concentrate on one thing at a time. I’m actually quite good at exams, and
interviews too - once I’m there in the room there’s no choice - I only have
what I have there with me - whether I’ve prepared well or badly there’s no
going back, and I relax, and I often do ok. The preparation though - the revision
and research - I’m hopeless - because it’s open-ended and I could be doing
anything at any time - I procrastinate. I could never do the reading
efficiently - the literature review. There just seemed to be a whole library
full of things that might be useful, or even crucial - how could I choose? The
thing I needed to know might be in the next volume, or on the next page. I
couldn’t read the whole book, let alone all the books that might conceivably
pertain to the subject. And then, as a post-grad there was a whole world of
articles that might be relevant too, and which someone might trip me up on if I
hadn’t read (and understood) them. I was lost.
More recently I have got the hang of prioritising. I used to look
at my to-do list and not know where the heck to start but I’ve learned that on
that list there are always a few things that really can’t wait and there is
usually a fairly clear order among them. One of my last visits to Mike the CBT Guy
furnished me with a piece of A4 divided by a cross into four quarters - the upper
half is for Urgent things, the lower for Non-urgent. The right hand half is for
Important things, the left for Unimportant. I’m good at Urgent things like
deadlines, getting to appointments on time, and dealing with emergencies (I’m
actually quite good in a crisis). Unimportant/Non-urgent things I’m fine with too
- like most people I can potter about - commenting on stuff on Facebook and looking
up plants and watching boxed sets - especially when there are other things I know
I should be getting on with. But it’s the Important but Non-urgent things that
are the problem - the things that really should be done but where there’s no
real time-limit - just on-going, open-ended effort - things like job-hunting,
and money and research, and finding publishers for my writing, or getting
things fixed around the house, and shopping around for insurance and utilities
providers. These are the things that I just can’t face. These are the things
that get me down. Of course, with most of them, if I don’t get around to them,
nobody suffers but me. It’s the work/money thing that’s the problem, because
then I have to go to my mum and ask her for help, or my friends have to bail me
out when my card doesn’t work, or i can't afford to go out and do nice things with my girlfriend. And although mum has savings and a pension and dad’s
life insurance, we are by no means a wealthy family, and I know she worries and
it’s humiliating and I feel guilty because I know I should be doing better by
now (I’m 53) and I should be able to find a job by now (I have a good master’s
degree ferchrissakes!) And yet…
I could get a ‘normal’ job - working for a nursery or a shop maybe.
It would be for little more than minimum wage so I’d have to work full time so
I couldn’t do anything else (I’m not one of these people with masses of energy)
and I’d have to give up the nursery (something I was able to set up exactly
because Miss Green financed it and I could do it with the resources and skills
I already had - but it makes a loss. Making the nursery more profitable is
another thing in the important-but-not-urgent corner of the diagram.) The idea
that I could get a proper graduate job that pays enough to either work part
time or which is interesting enough to keep me happy doing it full time, has
just never struck me as a very likely option. I know - that sounds mad but I
just can’t imagine it. That’s another of the weird and yet true-feeling ideas I
have about The World of Work - that ‘good jobs’ are just unimaginable. Going to
uni and getting my MSc and then going onto a Phd and getting a job as an ecologist
was my big idea of a career. Since that fell through half way through the Phd I’ve
had no more ideas about what to do instead, unless you count the nursery, and
of course the novels, neither of which pay.
So what am I to make of this?
No comments:
Post a Comment