Careers fair, or the cake that is me

The summer I graduated, a friend asked if I wanted to go to a careers fair with her in London. Honestly? I didn’t know if I wanted to, didn’t even understand the concept really.

I knew I should, I just didn’t know what to expect. Certainly, I didn’t know what to wear. I hadn’t been power-dress shopping yet, and even when I did, I never quite got that look.

So, I threw on a flowy patterned skirt and a smart blue top.

And spent all day feeling like I’d landed on another planet.

A planet where everyone wore shades of black and neutrals and spoke in words I didn’t know. A different language. A different species.

It was a perfect summer’s day and I was in London. There are so many wonderful things to do in London on a perfect summer’s day. Even as we walked into the huge windowless exhibition centre, taut with steel beams and metal panels, it felt all wrong.

I felt all wrong.

What was I doing here? I scanned the vast warehouse-like space. Hundreds and hundreds of near-identical looking stands blurred into one before my eyes.

My friend and I set off on this strange labyrinth, stopping occasionally at one stand or another to pick up a free pen, but I had no questions. There was nothing to ask about these jobs I neither wanted nor understood. It terrified me and only consolidated the feeling that I probably wasn’t cut out for success.

The problem was, everyone seemed to be expecting it. I’d come top of my class and was told I could probably ‘choose my salary’, but in reality, no one even acknowledged the piles of applications I was sending off, my carefully crafted cover letters remaining unanswered or, occasionally, rising to the dizzy heights of inspiring a mass-produced rejection letter back.

The reality was I had graduated into a fog-thick recession where there was a backlog of two or three years’ worth of unemployed graduates milling around the careers fairs, and indeed the system, before me. I had graduated with top grades yes, but without being specifically trained for any one thing.

The expectation seemed to be that I would walk into the kind of company that has a stand at an exhibition like this. So now, not only did I feel like an alien, I also felt like a failure for not wanting or achieving it. I knew it wasn’t just me. My fellow graduates were also limping along with temp work or minimum wage manual labour.

We’d somehow been led to believe that, on graduating, the world would open up like a blossoming flower. Proper ‘grown up’ life served on a plate with garnish. Money, job satisfaction and an impressive title!

Those who had graduated twenty, ten, even five years earlier had walked into sturdy jobs without any problem and couldn’t understand why we were dragging our feet so. There was deep shame in admitting how hard it was. Admitting my failure. A compounding of all the rejections. A loss of who I thought I was.

Those in the know were more understanding. The college careers advisor focused more on how to avoid spiralling into depression with the impending wave of rejections than on how to get a job, but others were simply mystified by our failure to get going.

It was probably unrealistic to think I would be able to squeeze myself into the very un-me-like shape of the corporate top tier. Of all the different ways of working that exist, I was simply not created for this one.

Admittedly, I wasn’t quite sure which kind of working I was made for. After a slightly terrifying experience of secondary school, teaching was off the table. Other language related jobs seemed out of reach, the few that existed snapped up in an instant. Creative work seemed out of the question.

This idea that I should be successful clashed with the truth that I had no idea what that might look like. I’d been told I would do something ‘amazing’. When exactly did that shift from a promise to a burden?

It seemed that I, along with all my messy thoughts about work, was a smorgasbord of different factors, casually dropped comments and opinions, so many things I listened to which took me away from who I really was.

Imagine a mixing bowl into which is flung – haphazardly, carelessly - a lack of self-confidence, a tendency for oversensitivity, the jokey, occasionally thoughtless comments of others (which I always laughed along with but also believed unwaveringly to be truth), the urgent well-meaning advice of my parents’ generation, the expectations (oh goodness, all those expectations) …and guilt. So much guilt about what I was failing to be and achieve – and not just in my career.

Sprinkle in a yearning for creativity so lemon-sharp it made my mouth ache, and give it a good stir.

The cake that came out of that mixing bowl was and is me. It’s not bad, but it does tend to crumble easily.

It’s a strange alchemy. All the ingredients that affected me so much back then might have been shaken off by a hardier soul. On its own, each component part was fairly tame. In retrospect, none of it was so bad. None of it was meant to crush me. But somehow, when all thrown in together, it did.

Eventually, that autumn, I landed a not-bad-at-all-in-the-circumstances job, organising training in a French bank’s conference centre. I thought this would quieten the voices, but the digging enquiries gathered strength. Should I be doing something more challenging? Aiming higher? How much was I earning? Really? Eyebrows rose. And again, I felt I had failed.

But here’s a thing: I enjoyed that job. I was good at it. I used my languages. I worked with people from all over the world. In exquisite surroundings. With delicious food thrown in. And lunchtime walks with colleagues through the lush gardens and adjoining golf course. I wasn’t going to get rich there, but then it wasn’t meant to be a forever job.

The problem was never the job but the expectations, the comparisons. We told ourselves everything had to be perfect immediately, the whole package. If not, we’d ‘failed’. And honestly? I still hold a little of that misplaced sense of failure, so many years later.

I wish someone had simply told me I would find my way. That you do what you can, not what you can’t. That it doesn’t have to be so flash and impressive - it just has to be real, and all the better if it incorporates something you love. Because, from there, however humble the beginning, other avenues open up. With unrushed time to ponder the next steps, new opportunities finally have a chance to unfurl.

And, more importantly, maybe it was never about how much status I could amass.

Maybe it was less about what I was doing and more about who I was in that place. The connections of hope and kindness I might make wherever I was planted. Looking to feed others with care rather than clamouring to feed my own bruised and hungry ego. Reflecting even a tiny bit of God's beauty.

Growing from roots of goodness rather than ambition.