This is me, 11 days before my 25th birthday.

I am so dry of hope that sometimes I wonder how my body produces tears or saliva or blood, how those bodily functions aren’t just immediately soaked up to create even a glimmer of something good.

This is me, 11 days before my 25th birthday. I have become exactly what everyone warned me I’d be when I announced I was getting an English degree: unemployed. Academically fulfilled with a creative writing Master’s, but poor, and sad. I think maybe I’m even worse than what people expected me to become, because I still feel like this wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I was too good. I was always too good. I’m still so good. It doesn’t matter, and no one cares. (Before any theoretically superior STEM groupies start talking, I like my life and I like my degree and I’m happy that I understand human behavior, and I’m sorry that you can’t fathom the significance of nuanced emotion and reflection.)

If this was a movie, not real life, the camera would zoom into my window, where my room is dark (even though my mother and I just painted it white because I think she finally realized that I’m living at home for the foreseeable future and if I didn’t do something with the cave that was the guest bedroom I’d have a breakdown) (and I might still have a breakdown anyway). I’m laying on my back on my bed and my cat is next to me. One perfectly shaped tear rolls out of my eye, and then another on the other side. 

If this was a movie, I hope it’d be the first part, before I go on funny adventures, ones that make me realize the beauty of life and how unimportant things like money are (yeah, okay). Everything starts to look up at the end, when I land my dream job and finally get over that one guy and I find a billion dollars on the ground. The movie would end in my new apartment, where I have friends gathered and we’re pouring wine and playing card games, even though I hate card games due to my inability to accept loss and my penchant for bending the rules in order for things to go my way. (In case any employers are reading this, that was a lie and I’m actually perfect, and I’d be a wonderful asset to your company and please reach out to hire me.) What an American indie classic that would be.

I fear, though, that this is the ending part of some ugly, old black and white French movie; the ending of something even sadder, where I waste time and money being happy and doing things that I love. And the final shot is me in my childhood bedroom at my mother’s house, broke and tragic, and I’m laying on my back on my bed and my cat is next to me. One perfectly shaped tear rolls out of my eye, and then another on the other side. Because in this movie, it does not matter. This, right now, 11 days before my 25th birthday, feels more like that. Like it doesn’t matter.

And I’m sitting here, being melodramatic because I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to feel. I wake up in the morning and spend the few dollars I have left at a coffee shop in order to get out of my house. I sit there, at my coffee shop of choice (which is always something new and smart looking that I can post on Instagram lest anyone realize how little I actually leave my room) (if you know me in real life, this is a lie and I’m perfect and I’m so happy and rich and I love my life). Job application after job application gets sent out, for hours. I tailor each cover letter to each job description so that I don’t get auto-booted from the selection process. I’m not comfortable telling you exactly how that is working out for me. (I don’t hear back from anyone unless it’s a rejection.) (After four months, I have received zero interviews.) I go home and eat lunch. I take a nap, even if I’m not tired because there’s nothing else for me to do and I’m actually always tired, even though I do nothing all day. I eat whatever my mom makes for dinner. I write something. I submit to journals who will inevitably reject me. (If you’re a publisher, I don’t know what to say to you. I have a collection of short stories that I think are good, I guess.) I go to sleep. What a shitty movie that makes. 

(Please excuse my highly American self-centric way of thinking in this section and indulge me here.) I know, realistically, that no one can be unemployed forever. But when you send out job applications and writing submissions all day, every day into an endless void that never sends anything back, you don’t feel that way. Hope waxes and wanes, and I’m currently in a hope deficit. I am so dry of hope that sometimes I wonder how my body produces tears or saliva or blood, how those bodily functions aren’t just immediately soaked up to create even a glimmer of something good. It begins to feel like maybe, I’ll be the first person in the universe to be stuck like this forever. It feels like I am alone in my bedroom and I am the only one who knows that I am worth anything at all. The only reason to keep sending things, shooting for jobs I’m qualified for, begging journals to let me volunteer for them, is that if I give up on myself then I’m not worth anything at all. 

I think today, 11 days before my 25th birthday, I am entering a quarter-life crisis. Except the crisis is not that my life isn’t what I want it to be. It’s that my life, right now, isn’t anything at all.