sarah drummondcache cache (Hide and Seek)
September 1st 2008 14:45
Most people say hello like it is a reflex, I choke on the word and it dies in my throat. The period of time in which it needed to be said has lapsed by the time I've rehearsed it 50 different ways and built up the courage to spit it out. It becomes a dry cough, I cover my mouth.
I reside in a muffled reality. Thoughts are like padding encasing the asylum of my mind. I'm suspended outside the moment a mute observer, watchig the reflection of myself in it, paralysed by the self consciousness of my own eye which constantly evaluates my performance and mocks.
I can't find a place for myself in this world where confidance is worshipped. I'm wasting the evening again slumped before the computer screen my hopes hanging on a mouseclick. The internet is a cruel window onto all the things there are out there at my fingertips to view but physically impossibly out of reach. My searches begin with a feverish clatter of type. I gradually sink lower and lower in my seat as I know that the virtual search is really just hiding in the possibilities so I don't have to face any reality's.
As usual at my lowest ebb I stamp heavily with sinking heart four letters. JOBS. Money being the only way of injecting some reality into my dreams. Agony hardens my throat my temples hurt and my eyes sting as job ad blurs into job ad and the more crippling and hope destroying reality settles in as a dark cloud over my head.
The criteria excludes me.
You have to be bubbly, outgoing, reliable, a team player, self assured and most important of all experienced (Unless you are particularly charismatic which seems to make up for all else.)
I don't know where all the bubbliness drains too once the shop assistants and cafe staff get the job but according to the ad, it's important.
The tears I smell and taste and sigh that expounds all spirit from my body is not because I can't be all these things. Beneath a shy, nevous, disorganised, uncertain exterior and behind a deer in headlight expression there lies alot of potential, but it is something no employer is going to take time to see. As they work on first impression basis, maybe not even that, So often I feel like they just smell my nervousness on me so that no amount of acted confidance is enough to conceal the wrinkles of anxiety. It is like I am fighting a virus that shuts me down in social situations and it never gets any better. I don't get much further than clicking on the ad and running my eyes to the phone number at the bottom of the page nowadays. Too many years of forcing myself to face the anxiety head on have reinforced my fears and drained me of the energy to face them while 4 years completing an arts degree has equipped me with no better prospects than still hospitality and barely that as all the years of experience don't seem to ad up to it. People only see how nervous you are and it is eternally your first day.
I click back dejected to facebook to feed my virtual pets then drag myself away from the screen that I feel is evaporating hours from my life.
You can be whoever you want in your dreams but it is only those who have the confidence to make it happen the function in reality.
The shy are invisible because they play out their lives in their heads but reality is only validated other peoples eyes and nobody has access to another person's daydream.
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