"At the end of the day, I just want to have a job and be happy."

This is an anonymous unemployment story submission.

I am currently unemployed after about four months. I average about two interviews per month and am constantly on the job hunt, trying to find a role that interests me, that I have a marginal chance of getting, and ones I have experience in. This is HARD. So many jobs posted require experience I don’t have. I am 25, a graduate, and am desperate to achieve and do things. Instead I’m stuck at home seemingly getting nowhere, with no replies to jobs I apply for, or else getting rejection emails. 🙁

What I feel worst about is getting through each day knowing virtually all my friends have good jobs now and are living their lives stably and I am not. Something that also gets me down is having interviewers judge me for “not going for a more challenging career based around my qualifications and experience” when that is what I have been doing, only not getting anywhere. This is when I’m confronted with applying for lowly sales assistant positions or till work, just to get some cash in my pocket, and even those are hard to grasp because I’m obviously overqualified and they can easily get some younger student in who don’t care too much about their weekly pay packet.

It is honestly so frustrating because I have members of my family forever asking “how’s the job hunt going” or “what are you doing with yourself now” during get togethers and I feel so inadequate because everyone else is on the ladder achieving things, with professional jobs and I STILL have got nothing. I don’t know what to do other than keep grinding. The only things that keep me going are writing as a content creator for an aspiring website about pop culture which I am really into, my close bunch of friends who are endlessly supportive, and music that honestly is one of the best motivations for getting out of bed in the morning. I really want to get into writing and social media as a career and I utilise it every day for promotion reasons and getting creative material out which a great deal of people appreciate, but all this as great as it is, doesn’t earn me any money. There are times when I just get so sad, and feel like I’m worthless, I won’t ever get to where I want to be in life…it’s an endless cycle.

?. One of my last jobs, I got fired because I couldn’t hack the pressure and kept making mistakes. I had been in it for almost a year and kinda enjoyed doing it despite being aware I was making a tonne of errors that kept being brought up in my performance reviews. That obviously had an impact on me getting future work when employers want to know why you left a job. Either you tell the truth, or lie about it, and which is the better option? Tell the truth and face the likelihood of not getting the job, or lie, have a better chance of getting hired and risk the employer finding out later. It’s a catch-22 situation.

I just don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. Everybody that I know seems to be succeeding and they have come from exactly the same path as me, gone to school, university, had shop jobs, gotten some work experience etc and have all somehow gotten on that career ladder. It’s getting to the point where I want to be doing something in my life that is meaningful, not sat at home not doing an awful lot, applying for jobs and getting nowhere. It’s debilitating and stigmatising. I feel like there is no other alternative but to keep on every day on all the job sites, handing in CV’s hoping for responses. There are so many things I want to do, I want to travel and see the world, do the things I enjoy with my friends, and I can’t do that without financing myself. I wish someone would give me a chance. I want to end this cycle of misery and judgement.