Status Update

I'm back to doing agency work again, but have (almost) made a decision: I'm giving up on the new career.

For now what I'm doing is low-paid and untaxing, but is a toy version of what my career really entails, is very low paid and is temporary. As a family we are the poorest we've ever been, but the thought of getting a proper job in my supposed career fills me with dread.

Because of all the crap that happened in my previous job, it will be another year before I'm fully qualified. Another year of being judged, graded and scrutinised, and (now) being terrified that the same thing will happen again: I'll think I'm doing all right and then be informed at some late stage, most emphatically, that I'm not. Things in my career are getting considerably worse under the Tories and I just don't think it's worth it. So I'm (probably) getting out.

I've been looking into going back into IT, which is what I did four years ago. Before the miscarriage, before being made redundant, before losing my literary agent and failing to get published and failing to make a living as a writer and failing to get anywhere with this new career and (successfully, hurrah) having another baby.

I stopped doing IT because I was made redundant, and then because I was having a baby, and then because I wanted to be a writer, and then because I didn't believe I would be able to get a job easily in IT because of the recession and because my skills are out of date. But it turns out my skills aren't as out of date as I thought, and anyway brushing them back up again won't be as hard as I thought. I think. I haven't actually got a job yet, so I may be wrong. But the recruiters seem to think I'm onto a winner. So we'll see. Failing that I think I'd rather some random tedious office job, for now at least, than return to the new career. So, unless my confidence magically returns or I discover I really am not qualified to do anything else, I'm probably giving up.

I hate giving up.

But what's the point of carrying on, if the reality is so utterly fucking miserable?

And how ironic, if I can indeed just walk back into a job in IT, when I thought it would be so hard?

It helps that I am no longer distracted by novel-writing, by small babies or the attempts to make them.

Plus ca change, and all that.

Life is hard still, and full of angst and worries and woe... but I am finally looking forward to a future that I can believe could be enjoyable, instead of one that I believed might maybe ought to be all right at some distant point in the future... but maybe not.

Onwards and upwards. Innit.