We’re now three weeks into the New Year and I’m feeling confident that this is going to the year where I’m not gonna stay idle for very long.

I’ve spent the past 12 months trying to land myself a job and I haven’t been really lucky on that department. As much as possible, I try to look at my predicament with much optimism because moaning and whining about it ain’t gonna give me any favors. While I appreciate my parents’ “encouragement”, I can’t help but feel annoyed by how they try to dissuade me from pursuing a career I chose for myself, and then “encourage” me to try something new.

My mother wanted me to apply to this government institution in Makati on the merit of my past experience working under the local government of our hometown. From the get-go, I though it was a bad idea because my skillset does not match the requirement that the job in question entails. Because she does this sorta of pouty face whenever she wants to guilt me into doing what she wants, I was like “Sure, okay. I’ll send them my resume”. And send it I did.

I got a call from the place I sent my resume to for an interview. I told my mom about it but left out a few key details, including the name of the company, so to ensure she never had to contact her friends from there and give a good word about me to them. That’s the thing I don’t really approve of because I don’t want to get hired on the basis that “some people who knows some people”. Basically connections and nepotism. I don’t want any of that.

Going straight to the point, I went there and got it over with. I could see in the interviewers’ face when they saw my resume that I was not the ideal candidate for the position they’re looking for. I really wasn’t.

As for my dad, he’s been really nagging me these past few month to either get any kind of job or go back to school and take up another degree. He’s clearly fixated at the thought that the course I took in college is not the ideal course for me to take at all.

Like most parents, they’d like to see their kids become a doctor, a teacher, an architect, or even an engineer (which is what my dad is).

Apart from egging me on to do as he says, I find it annoying that he wants me to do these things while shutting me down whenever I take a similar initiative to find an occupation while still searching for a job. He shut me down when I spoke about the thought of enrolling myself to deaf sign-language classes or Spanish-language ones at Instituto Cervantes. My plans for both haven’t changed, but unfortunately, I don’t have the finances to support myself at the moment, nor even the emotional support I would have expected from my own parents.

That’s the thing, I’m 24 years old now so I should already be making life-changing decisions without having to always go through my parents to gain their ringing endorsement. My parents already did their job in raising me and my three other siblings in such a way that we never have to depend on them for every single thing except for the love you’d expect a child to get from their mom and dad.

I’m just really hoping that this year would be the year that I would start trekking on an independent journey. Right now, I just came off from a job interview-and-exam that turned out really great (at least for me). I’m crossing my fingers that I pull through on this and finally land myself in a workplace finally. MLuckily, the position I’m after matches well with my pre-existing skillset and qualifications.

Apart from that, I’m hoping to go full-speed ahead with this freelance thing I’ve been planning on pursuing as a sort of-fulltime/parttime business, depending on my current job prospects. I got some stuff being ironed out, next thing i have to take care of are some paperwork in the legal channels. Hopefully, running a freelance service is not as bureaucratically burdenning as having to establish and run a mainstream business.

And to think I was out of the job for nearly two years. I know a lot of people would not stay sane on being on that state for that long a time, but I was. I kept myself off the looney radar by keeping myself busy in our house, practically becoming a housekeeper who would cook for the family, wash the laundry, clean and wipe the floors on a nearly daily basis, on top of binge-watching TV shows online and going out once in a while to watch a movie by my lonesome.

So 2015, please be my year!

(Originally written January 16, 2015)