I know I’ve probably ranted about this before (I don’t feel like going to find the link), but I hate it when a small glimmer of hope or a slight chance of success paradoxically makes you feel more depressed than usual.
Since I hate vaguebooking, I will elaborate: I got an email today from a job application I put out. It was one of the throwaway ones that I didn’t really expect to hear back from. You know the type: the ones that seem slightly related to your specialty (or at least more so than what you’re currently doing) but aren’t quite as interesting as they could be. Architecture students applying to be CAD monkeys instead of retail workers, to choose a completely random and unrelated-to-my-life example.
There’s not much more to say about it. I got a reply from someone, asking me to contact them tomorrow. No details, no further information, nothing. So I don’t know what to expect. Of course, my imagination has latched on and run with the possibilities, both good and bad. To make things “better,” I got the email while at work, and it shocked me out of the “retail haze” quite effectively, at least for a while. I was excited, obviously, and figured I would spend some time researching the firm this afternoon instead of playing video games and watching Netflix.
Needless to say, that didn’t happen.
For some reason, that small glimmer of hope perversely reminded me how untenable and un-ideal my current career situation is. It made me face the fact that I really don’t like my job. It reminded me that there’s (of course) so much more I could be doing to improve my situation. It reminded me of all the other glimmers of hope that preceded rejection. It reminded me that nothing I have done to try and climb out of Retail Hell as been successful. It made me feel trapped.
How can such a little bit of hope generate so much despair? It just seems so perverse and backwards. I wish I could find out why and punch it in its metaphorical face. I mean come on: how lame is it to have depression caused by hope? How are you supposed to work with that?
*stomps off*
While a bit more of a personal (depending on how you look at it) situation, I get much the same way when I want to finally approach someone to ask them out. My head should be filled with thoughts of how awesome it could be; it’s why I’m asking them out in the first place, after all. But instead, all I get is days of angst about how awful it’s going to be when I’m rejected, especially since I have a rather nasty track record (note: none of the relationships I’ve had that lasted more than a week started with me asking them out). After a while, expectations just kind of fall off, and you worry that it’s better to just not get your hopes up, because if you do, you’ll get crushed again.
And yet, we keep trying anyway. Definition of insanity, right? 😛
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For some reason, I’m getting a lot of spam comments on this post, so I’m going to disable comments for the time being.