Illin

BETHESDA, Md. — I’m sitting on a porch in suburban Washington, where I’ve been hunkered down for a week, awaiting my move into the city. It’s a perfect, late summer morning and I need to write something.

My days are mostly spent applying for journalism jobs, which, on the whole, makes me feel disposable and inhuman, then commiserating with my friends, who reassure me that I am quite employable/not useless. I don’t know if I could do this without them, fragile soul that I am. I’d like to think I’m capable of separating the personal and the professional in myself, but something deep down in there — the poet, perhaps — is roiled by the thought of someone judging me by a few piece of paper, without ever having met me. Such is business, though, I guess. And, thus, the importance of friends and family and literature — and all the other people and things that address you as a complete person.

It’s also just frustrating not to know what you don’t know. At least if I apply to graduate school again I’ll know what I like and don’t, and won’t feel like an idiot for criticizing what I potentially don’t even understand, which is kind of how I feel about what I’m writing now. I hate that. I can only read so many Bob Woodward books; at some point — now, fortune willing — I need to get in that scrum.

Despite my doubts, I remain assured that there are qualities you want in an employee — no matter the profession — that you can’t see until you give them a chance. A well-rounded person has a share of interiority that you only discover after you give them some liberty, and I think good employers realize that. Now I just need to find one.

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