It appears, after a bit of time looking through job postings today, that I am either way overqualified or way under qualified for everything out there. Nothing is a perfect fit (not that I'm expecting it to be, but is a pleasant surprise every now and then too much to ask?).
When job hunting lately I spend a couple hours here and there, with breaks in between, just to mitigate the frustration factor. Today this did not work and frustration won. I retreated to a quiet place in the house to re-group and re-think my approach, away from endless internet listings of jobs way out of my reach.
When all is said and done I think I am going to need to return to my roots; art and/or creative writing. Neither is a guaranteed paycheck, indeed I'd be incredibly disconnected from reality to think otherwise in this market. But it's the only option I have that doesn't require extensive re-training from the ground up, something that worries me if I try another profession; if I can't succeed in the (randomly chosen) profession, I've wasted my time and a whole lot of money. Failing is part of learning and doesn't much faze me these days, but with a family relying on you it makes it that much more difficult to recover if you do so. And it makes it incredibly hard to take that leap into the unknown.
I was trained classically in art school; charcoal and newsprint, pencil, pen and ink, watercolors, gouache, oil and acrylic canvases. (I even learned egg-tempera, which uses actual egg-yolk as a painting medium. I think that was Renaissance Painting Technique. I wonder if I could even find real rabbit-skin glue anymore, or if that's been removed from the market for humane reasons.)These days almost everything is digital art, so I'd need to re-train myself using the principals I learned for paper and canvas, and translate them to a computer program. It'd seem more daunting if I didn't already love art, and I suppose that is a good place to start. I've been wanting to get back into art via traditional mediums for a long time.
Writing needs to be done every day. And then rejected and polished, rejected and polished, over and over until someone finally decides your stuff might sell. Although I've heard self-publishing can kick-start you along if you think you've got a hot thing. (Perhaps a bit of blatant daydreaming there.)
Both these options are probably as difficult as training into a whole new job, but the difference for me is that I'm interested in both of them, and neither require a substantial outlay of money I don't have. And lately I have plenty of time. So why not re-train myself while occasionally checking the humorless ranks of job listings for even one job that has realistic requirements for people out of work and not overblown, ridiculous demands that neither new college graduates nor work veterans can hope to meet?
At this point I don't have anything to lose.
No comments:
Post a Comment