Dark days indeed

I'm pretty sure the initial panic I felt coursing through my veins after being laid off has been absorbed and diluted by my body and has resolved itself into a constant dread. It's no longer a stab, it's an ache. When this all went down almost two months ago, I was overwhelmed with the urge to fix it, to reenter the workforce come Hell or high water. The meager responses from employers have trickled down to absolutely nothing and an eerie dark silence has oozed in to my days. It all seems impossibly futile.

While talking to my beloved Mandrake, I likened it to tossing copy after copy of my resume down a well. As each sheet is swallowed by the blackness, I'm puzzled by my insistence on sending them down the well in the first place. I've spent seven years working in a place that has offered me no marketable talents. I have more than a half dozen years experience in idling. In busywork.

And one would think that the length of my stay at my now defunct position would stand as a testament to some sort of industriousness, of loyalty, but that's not how it works in New York. You're considered a fool if you stay at any one place for more than two years. The focus of the workforce here is always upward. Of course, that's assuming you're actually in the profession of your choice. Then one's focus is on the clock and the long hours remaining until happy hour.

What I'm saying is that I've painted myself into a corner. After college, I had to work at a pointless, mindless job in order to pay the bills so that I could act. But working left no time for acting, and I feel as if that ship has sailed (hell, I'm not sure if I was ever even near the dock). It's funny that the now curiously absent actors' "manager" from a few months ago and the corporate headhunter told me essentially the same thing: I'm too old and I have nothing to offer. I can't act, apparently, because I wasn't around in my twenties to build the relationships I needed to succeed because I was too busy working at a job which endowed me with absolutely no hope for a future in any other field. It's horribly perfect.

But, this is all narcissistic tripe. I'm just crying the blues into the void. I suppose I'm just glum because it was a little overcast this morning. It looks to be clearing up though.