It’s one thing to be employed and read the layoff headlines that are flooding the country; it’s entirely another to be one of the masses. Now I am part of the ranks of daytime TV watchers. It’s been a week and so far I’ve repainted my entire apartment, reorganized my furniture, found my good friend a job (ironic, yes), and spent two hours hiding in the Twilight Saga universe. For someone who has made a recent effort to keep professional achievement at the front line of her life, this is a nonsensical time. For someone who is constantly skeptical of the work world, this is an even worse time.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer: work and life must be separate and self sustaining entities. This is nearly impossible, I know. I recall ranting about work needing to be satisfying and fulfilling, adding to our lives instead of squandering its pleasurable moments. I don’t feel that way today. Today, a job is a job. It is an unfortunate bi-product of the world we live in and the hard financial times we’re facing.

Many of us are in the Next Step phase of our lives. We’re dealing with employment downturn, financial instability, and the New Media revolution. It’s become too easy for these worries to spill over into our personal lives and bring us down. I, for example, find it daunting to even enter job-bulletin websites; to start that grueling search all over. That fear of job instability can be crippling, making procrastinators out of us, suppressors of our responsibilities.

Investing in a new job. Emotionally. Financially. Are we ever ready for this undertaking? Probably not. Maybe a better question is, should we be so invested? Should we really force ourselves to fall in love with out careers, depend emotionally on them, and let the rug be pulled from under us when they are taken away? Or should we fight to separate our personal lives from our jobs as much as possible? Punch in and punch out.  I’d love to know what the masses think.

September has come and gone, and I’m not sitting behind a desk and taking notes. This is the first fall in many, many years that I find myself out of the classroom. I was excited to graduate from that stage of life and enter that “real world” I kept hearing about. Working through the summer was an exciting taste of adult life, but now fall is here and it’s time to go back to the classroom to sit, adsorb, and regurgitate the teachings of wiser women - except it isn’t! Naturally, the grass is always greener where your ass isn’t, so my yearning for the smell of new books isn’t a total shock. Neither is my desire to go to work in my pajamas… What is a shock is my desire for knowledge. All of a sudden, my brain feels light and useless! Yesterday I found myself picking up an old textbook for some “light reading”. Is this is just an old habit? I don’t think so!

I’d like to send a wake up call to all entry-level, recently graduated, employees. Just because we’re out of school doesn’t mean we have to surrender to the daily grind. Work is exhausting, life is even more exhausting, but I don’t believe we have to let go of all our curiosity. All these posts keep coming back to the life-work balance we’re all looking  for; how to distract ourselves from monotony, how to keep our lives interesting and our experiences new. Something about being in school kept the feeling of excitement and anticipation alive. Graduation tends to feel like we’ve arrived somewhere, somewhere concrete and finite. I have to keep reminding myself that this isn’t true. That what we commute to everyday doesn’t have to overpower our lives (unless we want it to), and that we can still be curious about the world and our ever changing place in it. I may just be trying to prioritize my life, or I may need to go back and hide in the academic world. Perhaps it’s time to revisit that grad school idea…

Technology is meant to better our lives; to deliver fast results, convenience, and to connect us with people we care about. In our life-work-balance discourse, I wholly nominate technology as our saving grace. Smart phones and wireless internet help me to make a smooth transition from the office to the bedroom. Answering my emails on the train ride home leaves me with one less thing to do when I get there. The ability to maintain constant connections via phones and social media has been an exciting aid in reaching out to friends and building relationships. I wonder though, have we become overzealous in our long distance relationships?

From what I hear of the analog days, it seems like people networked within a relatively small radius. You met someone in school, in your neighborhood, in your office building…etc. Now however, long distance relationships seem to be springing up everywhere. We’re not pen pals anymore. With phones, texting, video messaging, Skype, AIM, and a goodie bag of social media websites, we can stay in touch with our distant significant other, have real time conversations, and see each other on our computer screens while we chat. It’s possible that two people living many miles apart will communicate more now than two analog people living on the same block. This sounds great doesn’t it? The only problem is, we’re seeing people less and typing messages to them more. Are these digital relationships realistic, hopeful, and meaningful? I’m a little skeptical…

Wait a minute…so we just start working and don’t stop until retirement?! There are no extended breaks, no summer vacations? I was right all along! You do have to love what you do. Otherwise, this just seems impossible. My current position has an expiration date, which is frightening because it means my stability will collapse, and by summer’s end I will be forced to sniff out another opportunity. Although, what’s wrong with a short rest stop off the road of employment?

Full-time employment has somehow become synonymous with adulthood. Identities have become shaped around our business suits. Life plans are put on hold because losing the job that might land us our dream job is unthinkable. We begin to live our lives “when I finish this project” or “when I get that raise”. What makes me think that I’ll be any different? Absolutely nothing; herein lays my fear of this professional world I once so longed for.

When I graduated from college, I pretty much hit the ground running. I’ve only just settled into my nine to five, and already my thoughts are racing to the idea of going back to school, back-packing through Europe, or joining the Peace Corp. Why is it that all these things look colorful in my mind, while work looks like an endless black and white road, with no pit stops? What is the secret to life-work-balance and how do I maintain a firm grasp on my unconventional personality in these grey slacks? I’ll let you know when I do.

I had always considered myself relatively well-rounded and tried to dabble in different fields of study, hobbies, what have you. When the time came to choose a major, all my interests made it that much more difficult. Now I’m in sitting in my cubicle, at my first job out of college, pondering my future. It occurs to me that I still haven’t figured out what my “career” will be, or for that matter, what I want it to be.

As I toss the word “career” around in my head, it begins to sound strange and foreign. It is after all just a word. So I wonder, what does it mean to have a career? Is this really my goal in life? Or is this word just that, a word? One that we use to feel like we’ve achieved something important and can now move on with the rest of our bucket list.

The recession may have done me a favor. Layoffs left and right have forced some people to learn a new skill or to branch out into other fields and take on numerous “careers”. Many are no longer bound to nine-to-fives because their nine-to-fives no longer exist. Temping, freelancing, and volunteering have taken the place of many lost jobs, and I’m excited to say that people may be reluctant to return to the not-so-reliable nine-to-five. Perhaps this is the kind of “career” I’ve always been looking for, but didn’t know existed; the multi-career.

One thing I know for sure is that separating work and life is no easy feat. With the way things are going for me personally and for the country as a whole, we may not all have the luxury of boasting one solid job and enjoying the fruits of our labor on the weekends. Perhaps it’s time to let the two fuse together into a lifestyle that allows us to pour ourselves into our work and allowing for a seamless transition between the two. Of course I say this now. Next year I may want to grunt through the work day and never think of it again after 5 o’clock. I don’t know.

By the time I had reached the upper division classes in my undergraduate major, I was on a first name basis with many of my professors, was allowed to express my opinion freely, encouraged to form original and challenging ideas, and was generally treated like an intelligent person. It seems that graduates have to abandon that disposition when they leave college. I assumed that holding a Bachelor’s degree meant that I would continue to be taken seriously and would maintain a level of respect. Life after college takes an unexpected turn… I’m not sure I can handle being at the bottom of the food chain yet again.

I recently attended a networking event during which I was vehemently encouraged to generate conversation with panel members and industry professionals. It’s safe to say that these conversations were forced and uncomfortable. The entire event felt like a factory where the input was creative college students and the output was yet another army of mindless cubicle soldiers. Though we were given sound advice on inter-office behavior, the perfect elevator pitch, and personal presentation, I’m convinced that such advice is the reason that so many professionals are dissatisfied with their jobs.  Somewhere between the completion of our studies and the commencement of our careers, the quirks that set us apart from each other are shooed away and replaced by dollar signs and suit jackets. This is, however, not to knock the process of networking or the advice of industry vets, because I was very lucky to be in the same room as them, but I’m beginning to see networking as the answer to the question “if you had a super power, what would it be?”

Perhaps my liberal arts education made too big a skeptic out of me; I have trouble with fake smiles, and my conversations usually leave puddles of sarcasm on the floor. Entering the professional world and mingling with potential employers means controlling the impulses that make me want to say “let’s cut the crap, are you going to hire me or not?” I guess this is the beginning of an entirely new school of thought; the school of networking. I just hope I can stifle my ironic sense of humor for thirty seconds at a time, long enough for that elevator pitch.

Wait! I don’t want the standard plan. I don’t believe that life suddenly begins in your early twenties and you have to create your future out of thin air. Believe it or not, life has been happening all along. This has been the real world, and I have been shaping the kind of woman that I will continue to be. More than ever, being a well rounded woman is vital to success in your career, and in your personal life. And can it possibly get any harder? Not only do we have to keep up appearances, staying in shape and sporting the latest retro fad, but we have to be on constant alert for new developments in our respective fields of expertise. There’s enough Twittering, Facebooking, and LinkedIn-ing going on to make my head spin.

So with all this chaos, I’m also supposed to secure a romantic future? I’m not sure that’s a top priority anymore. My mother was married at my age - I don’t want to follow in her all-too-young footsteps. The perfect balancing act between life and work may not exist after all, and perhaps it shouldn’t. What’s wrong with immersing yourself in your job in lieu of rushing home to take care of a family? Reflect on the kind of person you’ve always been and see how that person fits into the “real world”. You may want to toss that suburban rule book out the window.

Approaching life after college…

As far as milestones go, today was a big one. College graduation. The speeches, greeting cards, and naïve undergraduates all claim that today is the day that your real life begins; as if we’ve been in a random spiral headed for collision with the real world. You can argue that this is true, but I’ll only buy it in the most literal sense: we’re now forced to accept full time jobs and begin some attempt at self maintenance.

Like many fresh grads, I’m gazing at a blank canvas. There is no longer a schedule of classes or even the temporary summer job. It is just me, and the future, staring each other down. Now the standard plan for the remainder of my life would go something like this: score an entry level job, meet a suitable man, climb the corporate ladder - but only until I get pregnant and/or am proposed to, at which point it’s safe to get pregnant! After that, life just becomes a suburban blur.

Every day one of my friends is engaged, married, talking about getting married, talking about getting engaged, or complaining because their boyfriend of four years has yet to “pop the question.”   I know finding a mate, and then subsequently marrying that person is high on the list of priorities for many, but I live with the mindset, “it’ll happen when it happens”.   I understand that marriage and family is an important part of discussion in our mid-to-upper twenties, but what happened to soul-searching? What happened to self-discovery? Or “Finding” ourselves?  I think of my friends signing marriage licenses, walking down the aisle, saying “YES!” to a man bent down on one knee, and it all seems exciting, life-changing, and romantic, but I am not there yet.  I am not ready to say those words, to sign those papers, or to walk down the aisle.

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