birthday month: a reflection
hello birthday month.
not even a month after i recovered from covid, i secured a temporary job for a local NGO. the gig lasted for a month. a huge pat on my back because i got the job on my own merit, plus being quarantined alone in my own room (not having to shoulder the burden of household chores) left one plenty of time to apply for jobs.
it was everything that i had hope for in a job; an amazing boss and colleagues, a good pay, office accessible by public transport, and a lavishly stocked pantry. this is it, i realized i am not made for capitalists retail jobs.
one month. one month of me able to do a lot of things when i have a source of income. i gave my mother money for groceries. i got a haircut. i bought vitamins for myself. i bought food and supplies for my cats. i fixed my light bulb and my broken shower head. i went to the local wholesale snack supplier and helped restocked the pantry with plenty of my favourite childhood snacks for my teammates (most of them on average are twenty years younger than me). on my daily commute to work, i find myself doing random acts of kindness towards strangers. not because i wanted to feel good about myself, but because deep down inside i still believe people are inherently good, and everyone deserves kindness.
sadly, the job only lasted for a month; monitoring the six states elections. they did express their interests to have me permanently on their team. i applied for the communications officer position and unfortunately i was rejected due to the fact that it's a senior position and my experience had been mostly in retail/operations/service line.
here i am, two months later, back to zero. back again to the poverty shithole that i was from. still applying for work, still receiving rejection letters in droves.
what am i celebrating my 41st birthday for? being poor? multiple health problems due to malnutrition? my mental health hanging by a thread?
deep down inside, i wondered what kind of person i had become. for years (or at least since the pandemic started) i had been a negative, pessimistic, angry person. being stuck in an unemployment limbo for nearly three years changed me. i suppose if it's just me being jobless, it won't be as bad but the worse thing is we're plunged into poverty by my father's irresponsible financial decisions and now the burden of feeding the family fell on my shoulders.
i did not ask for this.
what do i want for my birthday? a career, or a job at least. a work/life balance. good people to work with. all of us are cogs in the capitalists system. at the very least if this system put food on the table, pay the bills and provide me with healthcare, then so be it. i'm a fucking cog then.
drown me in basic comforts. i'm tired of drowning in poverty.
"all my grief says the same thing:
this isn't how it's supposed to be.
this isn't how it's supposed to be.
and the world laughs.
holds my hope by the throat, says:
**but this is how it is***"*
-- fortesa latifi