When I was younger, so around 15 or 17 I tried to get a job at a retail store in Aleppo, Syria but I felt too shy to directly ask a store clerk. It was awkward. And I regret that a lot because it could’ve been a huge opportunity to get to know Syria from a different perspective before the civil war. My first real attempt at applying to a job was when I was 18 was in Tilburg, the Netherlands. I went to a Subway store and asked them if they were hiring but they said no. When I was in Tilburg I thought to myself that the best way to get a job was to find other middle-eastern people and try to find jobs through my connections with them. That did not work out as well as I hoped it would and then I forgot about that for some weird reason. Then I moved to Rotterdam and completely forgot about that.
Before moving to Rotterdam I was in Burlington, Canada for a little while and stayed for a presentation about kitchen knives from a company called Vector Marketing through Monster (remember Monster?). It was awkward and I realized I didn’t have a network in Canada. After that I went to Rotterdam, and started another program in a university.
Indeed seems to have changed the game for applying to jobs. Before Indeed I would use Monster but it wasn’t as engaging as Indeed was, and Monster didn’t offer the same type of jobs that Indeed had. I did get a job in Rotterdam at GDCC by hearing about the company from a friend because a lot of university students worked there.
Indeed only became more relevant to me for finding a job when I was looking for internships after I failed my first internship. I became more desperate so the need to be able to apply to several jobs became more pressing. I was definitely pressed for a job in the Netherlands. But I would press the quit button before I could even start at some point. It wasn’t a good time.
In Canada I was a little more vicious with applying. I found a sales job, and then a job in a bakery, and then a customer service job. The customer service job was a decent fit for me but then I quit to go back to the same school doing the same program after my depressing fails. That wasn’t a great decision.
Looking at this with 20/20 vision I see that I’ve been like a bull in a China shop in the West. It didn’t start out that way, but at this point it is what it is. I’m not comfortable being in the West, or comfortable working or using the Internet here. It sucks. I’m looking for jobs in ESL because I have a certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language but had some visa issues. In hindsight (a common theme in this post) I should’ve acted more swiftly. Now I’m online applying everywhere.
It seems like the better you are at your job, the fewer applications you have to make. On Upwork and Fiverr I find it’s a similar story. Looking for clients mirrors the way you look for jobs and your success is based on how good you are. I started out at a decent pace with finding a client when I was in Canada, but it went south because of dumb reasons. So my only option seems to be to study something new and start over. COVID-19 has not made my worldview any easier, but my parents are stuck here too instead of traveling around or at least being rid of me. It’s the result of being dismissive of signs like failing school and thinking I could get away with it.
I think my biggest mistake was thinking that the same rules that other people were living by applied to me when the difference was that they passed their university programs, and I didn’t. And that they were smarter, more social and more hard-working than me, and therefore deserved higher expectations from themselves, and others. I couldn’t go to China because my dad didn’t help me with my visa at 26 years old. It’s natural to think that you can do it yourself at that age but I did need him to help me.
I’ve been dependent on my parents throughout my adult life. And that hasn’t been good either. I think the future loss is my loss of passion for writing and I won’t know why that happened or be able to fix it. I think it amounts to a small failure in the past that I couldn’t see through but should’ve. But no such thing as shoulda, coulda, woulda.