literature

Lack Luster

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Lack Luster

I hate being in my early twenties.

You’re not clever enough, not old enough, not experienced enough to gain the experience you want to get a job. Hell, most internships need 3 years’ experience of interning. So you can’t get the experience you need to go ahead and make something of yourself. Forget jobs. The J-word no longer exists for you. It’s a speck of light that might get bigger once you hit thirty. But I’m twenty four. I’ve proven myself time and again in student jobs, internships, paid and unpaid. What do I need to do? Where did my friends and family members sell their souls to get ahead to the places they have reached? What game did they play? Did they cheat? Should I have been a worse person and cheated my way through life? Or do I just wait for thirty?

My current internship is coming to an end. It looms before my eyes like the great maw of Nothing, coming ever closer, faster some weeks, slower others. Its great fangs of uncertainty are already nibbling at my chest, venom cascading through my gut as I fall into depression.

I’m not good enough, but I’m better than my peers. I don’t think I’m amazing, but even I can see that I work harder and have a deeper knowledge than they. They tell me I should be employed on the spot. Flattery? Sycophancy? Making a potential friend in a high place to be useful later on? What do I know? I know that to my boss, I’m not enough. And yet, I try. And yet I will continue to pour my guts into this thankless job that won’t employ me. Because I have to? Because I want to? Because …why? What’s the point? I guess, it’s because I don’t know any better.

Meanwhile the stream of rejections is trying desperately to drown you, while you push your head up for air every chance you get.

Look at me. You’ve seen me. A young woman in her early twenties who fits no stereotype. British accent, but not British enough. Dark features, but not Mediterranean enough. Too chubby to buy clothes on the high-street, too slim to buy others. Eating disorders? Maybe. I don’t even know anymore. I can go from eating nothing for a whole 15 hours to gorging on biscuits for comfort. Secure in the knowledge that I am supposedly attractive and clever, while feeling like I’m pushing the sell-by date. I don’t even know anymore.
There’s someone out there for everyone, apparently. Not for me. Too cautious? Maybe. I don’t want a one night stand. I don’t want a foul relationship. I don’t want someone to decide that I’m perfect, out of their league, but going to cling to me like I might leave. I don’t want a lot of things. I’m picky. Not because I dislike people. I want someone to value me, who I can have a conversation with, common points aren’t a major issue as these are things that make us different. Right? Maybe.

I’ve been asked out a few times by men who want to add me to their ‘look what I had last night’ lists. By men who decided I was out of their leagues, but interested enough to at least talk to them, which had to be something, right? It had to be something, right? Attention. Intrigue. Lust. But you didn’t like them enough for that. Those were their emotions.

I was rejected again today. Someone I thought potential. There have been a few. People who walk in, say ‘hi’ with that confident smile that suggests that you’re of interest, but you’ll never know because the girlfriend is looming over like a great shadow you didn’t see until it was too late. Now you have to wait for the bruise to go down. Not broken hearted. Heart bruised.

Are you damned to be a spinster for the rest of your life? “They’re not made they’re born”. Wrong. Very very wrong. They’re made. They’re made by being proud of their personality, of their intelligence, of who they are, and that means that they cannot be accepted for it. Ever. It’s frightening. It’s intimidating. It’s something worth rejecting.

And you resign yourself.

And you find the biscuit tin and you take one. And one is not enough. You take too many. You skip dinner.

You feel like you’re in pain, but the pain is not surfacing enough for your brain to understand why you feel the way you do. You want a knife, a burn, a punch to wake you up to the pain you should be feeling. But it’s not enough. And you know it’s not enough. And you wonder what you can do for it to ever feel like enough pain to mirror what it is you feel inside.

Nothing.

The great snake that is Nothing that is coming to eat you whole the day you finish being able to pour your heart and soul into work and failed chances. The great hole that you wish would just take away all choices you have to make and all the people who don’t like you, or want you to do better, or simply can’t appreciate your head.

And you die a little while you wait for the climb.
A soliloquy I'm working on, perhaps for a play on the unfair way twenty-somethings are currently being treated.
© 2016 - 2024 Mugiwara-no-Eli
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