Jobs vs Careers

There's a pile of laundry calling my name. I suppose I should go fold it...but I'm procrastinating. It's my last day off before another work week and I'm relaxing on the couch, wearing pajamas and watching Frasier on Netflix with a bowl of chocolate ice cream. Ahhh...

The new job is...well...I like the hours and the schedule, I like spending more time with my sweetheart and my puppy, and I'm really glad to be out of the previous job. But the job itself is an extremely high-activity job involving 15-20 miles of walking every night, plus strenuous bending, reaching, squatting, and stretching. It's literally tearing my body apart. I haven't hurt this much since basic training. My back, shoulders, and neck are starting to get used to it, but the old knee injury is acting up, and my feet hurt nearly unbearably by the end of the shift. I don't mean to complain, I just don't know how much longer I can take this job...and to be honest it's disappointing.

I've been struggling a lot lately with trying to figure out where I'm going in life. I'm so incredibly thankful for an amazing husband, who is kind and understanding and supportive of whatever I want to do. The problem? I don't know what I want to do.

I've wanted to be a cop since I was a kid, so I became an MP, and quickly realized that it's not exactly what I thought it was. Police departments are run by politics, it's hard to get in unless you know someone, and once you're in it's still not much of a life for a family until you've been in long enough to make something more than street patrol. To be honest, the Army isn't exactly what I thought it was either, and I've found myself disillusioned with where I had always thought I would go in life.

My team leader made an interesting comment the other day. Someone mentioned an upcoming career fair and he replied, "I need a career. I have a job but I don't have a career."

That's exactly where both my husband and I find ourselves. He has a decent job but not one that he wants to do for the next 30 years, and I have a job I'm not sure I'll last another few months in, much less years. Very few people even have careers these days, and a lot of the people that thought they had careers ended up losing their jobs in recent days due to our country's economy shift. The large amount of unemployed people with age and experience makes it even harder for those of us just starting out to get career-starting jobs, because employers can afford to be picky and choose the better qualified, well experienced candidates instead of the entry-level like us.

We're praying about my honey going back into active duty military life, which would be beneficial on many levels: we would make a lot better income, allowing us to start a family when we're ready, and also allowing me to go back to school to finish my degree and choose a line of work I actually want to do. Of course, that begs the obvious question: what do I really want to do?

There will always be politics, stress, unpleasant people, and personal issues in every line of work, but I still have hopes that maybe someday I could actually look forward to going to work instead of dreading it. That maybe someday I could be proud of what I'm doing instead of being embarrassed to tell people what job I'm working. That maybe someday I could have a career instead of just a job, a long term option to help provide for our family instead of just something I have to do to pay the bills and make ends meet. Is that too much to hope for?

So here I am, an adult woman and a happily married wife, still trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. I'm tired of living paycheck to paycheck, tired of trying to make ends meet, tired of going to jobs I don't like. And this is not the life that either of us want for us or for a family someday. We certainly can't afford to start a family now, nor would it be fair to bring kids into a still somewhat financially unstable home.

(Side note... before you jump to conclusions, yes we budget, yes we are careful with our finances, and yes we are still barely making ends meet. That's just life right now, working dead-end jobs because nobody wants to hire someone with less experience - but how do you get experience if you're not hired? So yes we're doing all we can with the income we are blessed to have, but it's still not a long-term solution.)

Someday, God be willing, there will be a couple rocking chairs sitting on a front porch on a piece of land somewhere. If we make it to those rocking chairs and look back on working through everything together, it will all be worth it. So many couples have gone through much, much worse situations and come out all right in the end, but the process to getting there is slow and we can't see past the next turn in the road. Only God knows where we'll be going next, and in the meantime it's up to us to trust Him and figure out the next steps to take. Until then, we'll just do everything we can to enjoy the journey...

Easter 2015