Job Hunt (Week 1)

Current Totals: 58 applications, 6 scheduled interviews, 15 rejections, 3 scams

If I may be completely honest: This is going way better than I thought it would, which is a huge relief. Obviously, it's not over until the fat lady sings. I still have more mountain to climb, but I'm going to celebrate my little win here in light of everything going on. The country may be descending into fascist oligarchy tomorrow, but at least I got a few calls for interviews.

I flagged down my manager on Tuesday and notified him that I was actively hunting for alternative employment. I was going to tell him Monday morning during our weekly one-on-one, but that got cancelled until annual reviews. Despite my distaste for the job, my manager was actually a pretty decent guy. He was extraordinarily white-collar millennial, and signaled to me that he was leaning to the left, but he was trapped in the impotent position of middle management: No actual power but infinite responsibility. Watching him flounder against rapidly decreasing team morale and increasingly stringent and restrictive policy writing guidelines made me realize that the real lynchpin that would turn the industry around would be unionization. If the grunt-workers writing and enforcing policies across the whole insurance industry got together and started demanding that companies stop changing their writing rules every five minutes and fucking over the clients then there might be some actual progress towards reform.

However, it's just as (if not more) likely that we'd all get fired and replaced by AI. 'Suppose that's the perks of working a bullshit job. 'Ce la vie' and all that jazz.

My manager didn't seem all that surprised when I told him the news. Figures that the writing has been on the wall for some time. I did try to quit this job once before, and the department director negotiated a internal transfer to a different office and a 50 cent raise that I didn't actually get for another year. The transfer has been rife with problems from the start and it really has started to come to a head in the last six months. I was put on a PIP around spring of 2024 and ever since Tick-Tock the Croc has been following me around. I completed the PIP after a few months, but I never regained that job security and the anxiety it caused me festered like an untreated wound- accelerated by poverty wages and constant struggle against the endless stream of bills and debt. For months the only thing keeping me tethered to the insurance desk was exhaustion and the haunting knowledge that I'd be cooked extra well-done if I missed a single paycheck.

I think what is making this flight attempt different is a combination of things. For one, when I started my transfer I was living alone and my rent by itself ate 30% of my income in one bite, and I had no real plans for where my life was going. Since then I moved in with a long-distance friend that I met on Twitter before Elon ruined it, cut my rent in half by relocating to a shabby 2-bedroom in a spittoon of a town, and set my gay little heart on moving back to the city where my brother and sister live so I can be close to them while the world gets scarier and scarier. Getting to that goal will also take a lot of work, but I'll get there one step at a time.

I'm reluctant to make an ironed-out plan, because every time I do it seems like life takes it as a personal challenge, but I do see a strategy forming in the murk. See, one of the things that always stood out to me since I started in insurance was simply how exhausted I felt at the end of every work day. It was bewildering, especially because the role I filled prior was a lot more physically taxing. I'd be up, down, and running all around at my last job as a sales associate, with less pay, next to no benefits, and no weekends. Yet, I could still find the energy to meal-prep and write when I got home. These days I don't even leave my chair more than ten times a day, much less my house, but I am DEAD at five pm when I clock out. I've felt completely burned out for going on three years now, and it's been eating at me how little personal growth I've been able to do despite the 'relaxed' working conditions. And I'm through with wasting the time I have left.

Once I free myself from a job that is sucking my lifeforce from my marrow, I can contemplate some secondary education and keep writing. I'm thinking about getting certified in something blue-collar, but we shall see. The city where my siblings live is larger, so the competition will be steep. If I can show up with some practical skills then I'll have a better chance finding a job that will afford me city rent.

Writing and creating will keep me from going completely insane. I've always used creativity as a North Star. Even when all else has failed, I can pick up a brush or a pen to offload my fear and grief. And the things I have made in the past have always taken me to the places I needed to go, introduced me to the people I needed to meet, and helped me understand the lessons that I needed to learn. The only thing they can't seem to bring me is money, but I suppose clarity has no price tag. It's just as Joan Didion said, "I don't know what I think until I write it down." And hey, maybe one day I'll get lucky enough to build a new life from the foundations of art. Stranger things have happened!