Day 234: The Unpaid Parts of Life are Harder

Everyone has a job. In fact, most of us have more than one job, we just don’t always get paid for all the work we do. Sometimes, the actual prep work is more lengthy and exhausting than the employment itself, but that is the thankless part of our lives. The average working woman for instance gets up way too early, puts in the work to make herself look presentable, gets the kids up, helps them to get ready, makes lunches, makes sure everyone has breakfast, cleans up the breakfast dishes, gets everyone out the door and finally gets herself to work. This is sometimes three hours worth of work before she actually clocks in and no one’s paying her for this or the five hours of work she’s facing once she leaves the office. I don’t have a real source of employment at the moment, but I can tell you that looking for work, managing my own home and life and prepping to apply for grad school is harder than any job I could get. Where’s my paycheck?

It’s tiring and frustrating doing all this work and receiving no tangible reward. Work was never this hard and at least at a job there is usually someone giving you some direction. Real life provides no instruction and no pay for doing what we have to do. I’ve had somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 jobs since I was 15 and right now, this whole looking for work, trying to go back to school, keeping my shit together is the hardest of them all. I get up every day and have no idea where to start. Just to even get a letter of reference written there are 5-8 steps involving research, reading, phone calls, emails, pre-writing of the letter, registration at the school’s site, etc. That’s for one letter. In addition to the letters there are a dozen other things I have to do to apply to school and studying for and taking the GRE are pretty hefty on the time/energy scale.

I’ve never been a great housekeeper, but when I am so overwhelmed and busy with diet, fitness, school, research, resumes for potential jobs and day-to-day tasks it really begins to suffer. Today I realized that the “toys” my cats were playing with including a remnant of last nights snack and part of this morning’s breakfast. I’m actually a great worker and I’ll put in overtime or weekends to get the job done, but being at home and wading through the wreckage of my life and trying to piece something together for the future is making long for the days when I cleaned the dining room at Taco Bell back in high school. If someone told me when I was younger that the parts of life I didn’t get paid for would be harder I might have lived a little differently up to this point. Maybe I never would have left T-Bell. Hey, it’s a paycheck.