Never Giving Up

In the culture I grew up in, a person and their job tend to blur into the same thing. Finish college, and the clock starts: land work quickly or your life is assumed to be some kind of ruin. I had always done well in school, finished my master's with distinction and strong marks, and still came up empty when I went looking for a position.

My timing could not have been worse. The recession hit right as I graduated. All around me people were being let go, and professionals with real experience were offering to take jobs for far less than before. A company would post three openings and close to three hundred applicants would be crammed into the office waiting to interview. The competition kept sharpening, and with each round my sense of my own worth thinned out. Anxiety crept in, then something heavier.

Plenty of my classmates were also out of work, but I was convinced my situation stung more. Up to that point I had never been still. School had kept me moving from one thing to the next, and now there was nothing ahead that I could name. That blankness left me both wounded and furious.

A job, I came to see, is not only a paycheck. It feeds how you picture yourself and how others place you. Strip it away and you become an "unemployed person," and that single word flattened whatever hope I had left. After more than fifteen interviews without one offer, I gave up the search. Loneliness and a low mood pushed me toward drinking.

So I stopped applying altogether. I went out with friends who were also idle, drank, came home drunk, and slept it off. Months passed this way. When anyone in my family asked how I was doing I would snap at them and walk off. I knew their concern was genuine, and that only sharpened my resentment toward everyone. Why had they pushed me to study? What was all this knowledge actually good for? Why would no one see what I could do? Each unanswered question fed the fire.

One morning my father came into my room and said he wanted to talk. I told him I had no interest in hearing anything. He asked for ten minutes, so I gave in. He had my sister bring two coffees, and we carried the mugs out to the balcony and sat.

He started with a question: "How long since you last opened your mail?" More than two weeks, I told him. I had no desire to scroll through promotions from shopping sites and job boards.

Then he pressed harder. "Why are you so angry at everyone, and why are you punishing yourself over it? This is only your first step. You spent all those years as a student, and now, for the first time, you stand on your own and get to choose your own path and earn your own way. But that freedom carries a cost. It comes bundled with responsibility, and part of being responsible is being patient. What has you so shaken is fifteen failed interviews out of college, isn't it? Every person you admire has failed too, some of them over and over, and the reason they got where they are is simple. They refused to stop."

He kept going. "You have been bright and capable all your life, and you have let one setback flatten you. Take what failure teaches you, sharpen your skills, and stop firing off applications to every opening you stumble across. Sit still and work out which job would actually make you happy. Don't chase money. Money matters, but it is not the whole of a life. Your work should bring you some joy and satisfaction, and you should care about what you do. That is what I wanted to say to you. As your father, and as a friend, I will be proud of you whether you succeed or fail, and this family will stand with you at every step. One last thing before you decide anything. Go check your mail."

His last words undid me. I could not meet his eyes, and the tears came. The moment he left the room I went straight to my laptop. He had forwarded me two things: an article and a job opportunity letter. I opened the article first. It was about well-known people who kept going after being turned down again and again. The names included J. K. Rowling, who wrote Harry Potter, Stephen King, Jim Carrey, Tyler Perry, Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex and the City, Emily Blunt, Oprah Winfrey, and many more. I read every word.

I sat with that list the rest of the day. If all those people could break through so much, what was my excuse? What had I been doing with myself? When exactly had I let my nerve slip away? I told myself I was done quitting. I grabbed a sheet of paper, wrote that promise in large block letters, and taped it to my mirror.

When I went back to the laptop, I opened the second thing my father had sent. It was a call letter for a PhD place at a top university, with a solid stipend attached. It clicked for me at once how well that fit my research skills, and I remembered how my professors had always praised my projects. Right then I decided I would become a scholar.

I applied carrying a quiet certainty that it would work out, and I got the interview. Within thirty days the appointment letter arrived. Only after I started did I learn the numbers: more than a thousand students had applied, five hundred were called, and after screening just eighteen were admitted. Hearing that, I reached back and patted my own shoulder. "Good job," I said to myself.