Elephant Skin

I need thicker skin. I'd have to equate my skin to tissue paper these days, or maybe butterfly wings. And I need thicker skin. I'll be real honest: I HATE job hunting. Like hate it with a passion. I'm so much more likely to stay in a crappy job that I'm unhappy at than to leave in search of better things because I HATE the entire process.

I hate having to boil my life, personality, experience, skills, and qualifications down to one page. I hate looking at and remembering all of the places I've been and all of the time I've spent at jobs that didn't "get me anywhere". I hate "putting myself out there". I hate indifference. I hate rejection. I hate job hunting.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I think my generation was given a giant dose of "you can do it" and that has been a major disservice to us. While it's great to believe in yourself and have self confidence, it's not nice to believe the world is one way only to discover the ugly truth years later. My childhood majorly set me up for failure.

Take high school. I honestly cannot remember one thing that I applied for that I didn't get in high school. No really. I was not the most involved, not by a long shot. I was not the smartest. I didn't have the best grades. I was so far from most popular, I wasn't even in that category. And yet, I won my high school's top senior superlative. Granted it was voted by teachers and administrators and not my fellow peers, but still. I won. Miss North Hall was an award given to a senior boy and a senior girl who "most represent what it means to be a Trojan". That's about as undescriptive an award as I've ever heard, but basically it went to a well-rounded guy and gal that the teachers valued. I threw my name in the hat at the last minute on the recommendation of a teacher. "Hey, it will look good on a college application," she said. It's a totally lame reason because by May, when the award is announced, everyone pretty much already knows where they are going, and applications have been in forever, but I applied anyway on a whim. And I won. So weird.

I also managed to graduate high in my class, without even trying. Don't get me wrong, I worked really hard in high school. It's my nature to do all of my homework just in case the teacher takes it up. I made one B in high school my first semester. If I hadn't, I might have been more competitive in the race to the top. But after the B, I figured I was out. So many people make straight A's, the B kind of sunk me. Plus, by my junior year I was so over high school, I didn't care about more AP courses, I was ready to move on. During my senior year I took more courses at the local college than I did at my high school. My last semester I returned to campus each day to fulfill my duties as yearbook editor. Yep, that was my only high school class. I wasn't paying a bit of attention to who was going to be giving the valedictorian speech come graduation. I knew it wasn't me, so my thoughts were "just hand me my diploma, and get me out of here". Wham! In the midst of all of the squabbling and fussing for the top five coveted spots in the GPA rankings, I was suddenly 3rd.

I say all of this to simply paint a picture: high school was so easy for me. Things were just handed to me. I joined most clubs, took on most projects, and applied for most things based on someone's recommendation. I wasn't out there trying to be the best. I had friends who were in the hunt to be the top. They had to ace the exam, win the award, join the club. They wanted big things like med school. I wasn't sure how I really even felt about college (I mean, I'm going to be a stay at home mom, remember?). Being editor, leader, chairman, etc just fell into my lap all of the time. I never asked for it. I guess I was "one of those girls." Ughhh. People probably hated me.

But literally, the only thing that I ever failed at in high school was volleyball. And believe me, this was no great shock to my self esteem. I knew from an early age that sports were not my thing. I met some great older girls just before starting high school who had me believing that my height was such an advantage that I'd be awesome at volleyball despite my inadequate coordination. Silly them. I still sucked regardless of my height. I played for two years on the junior varsity team while my friends played for varsity. I got sick of that and quit after my sophomore year. See what adversity gets me?

So now, here I am, an adult. Past history tells me that people will be lining up to offer me jobs. Seriously, if adult life went like my first 18 years of life, I would be employed and yet I would get calls from people who "need me" to come work for them. Obviously, the real world of adulthood has been a major wake-up call to me. I won't say that I entered the real world after graduating form college with a chip on my shoulder or a "trust fund kid" mentality about the world, but I did think that despite the terrible job market, things would be fairly easy for me. Life always had been before.

And of course it's not. People aren't out there searching high and low for a job for me. My phone's not ringing off the hook with all the offers competing for my time and attention. No, in the real world, I'm a little fish in a big pond. I'm with LOTS of people who need jobs. And the people who get the jobs are the ones who put themselves out there the most, and let's be honest, make the most noise. I'm not a noise maker. I want people to want me purely based on me. So when they in fact, don't want me, aren't interested, or don't call back, it hurts. I need thicker skin.