Life After College Graduation
Hey everybody. I hope you are having a wonderful week and that the New Year is treating you well. I can’t complain for the most part. I thoroughly enjoyed writing my last post. I am starting to develop a love for writing. I have often been told I am a good storyteller, but I’m not entirely sure if I agree. Maybe I am, who knows? Maybe people are just trying to be nice haha. But anyway, this journey so far in creating this website has been so much fun. I’m thinking once I have some extra money coming in to promote my website and try to grow my audience.
I have been on the fence about growing my site through newsletters, advertisements, and the like. My thought process has been, “What is the point of marketing and advertising your website when you’re not selling anything?” After much research, it seems like I should seriously consider putting my social media and digital marketing skills to the test and see what the best practices are to grow my audience. Because what is the point of posting these blog posts if no one is reading them, right? If I want to reach more people online, then I will need to invest more in my website.
Right, about this blog post. This week I want to talk about my life after I graduated from college several years back. It’s now approaching five years since I graduated. As I mentioned in my previous post, I graduated from 2 colleges in the same semester, which was in late July 2019. It has been a rollercoaster, to say the least. One of my crosses to bear in my adult life is being able to find a career that I can see myself doing. With an academic background in social media marketing, I have had a difficult time finding a job. I have a degree, but I don’t have enough professional experience for opportunities to present themselves.
It has been frustrating looking for a marketing job. It got to the point where I was sending out literally hundreds, if not thousands of applications across the country, and nothing was happening. Throughout this whole job-hunting process, I got to the point where I decided I didn’t want to become a social media marketer anymore. My passion for social media was waning and I got to the point where I was desperate to work almost anywhere I could see myself growing. And it has led to a lot of random career paths which unfortunately led to nowhere.
Shortly after I graduated, the COVID pandemic hit and it was virtually impossible to find a marketing job, at least one close to where I live. Fortunately, my parents have been gracious enough for me to stay with them as I seek employment. I have pursued a plethora of different career paths. I tried to pursue a career as a military chaplain, but that required more schooling for an insignificant pay raise which I wasn’t down with. I tried that opportunity and was accepted into a religious institute in San Francisco, but shortly after my first semester quickly realized that I wasn’t interested nor agreed with the material that was being taught at the religious institution. So, I tried to become a Hospice Chaplain but after several months of doing that, it required me to spend more money than I had to get more schooling. At this point, I was in my early thirties and was tired of getting more education and wanted to get working in the professional world instead of just doing free labor.
I had a young woman help me to try to find a career path as a medical technician, but at the time I was feeling overwhelmed with my final semester of college and she ended up moving out of state so that opportunity fizzled out. And, more recently, I went into the military to serve in the US Navy as an Aviation Maintenance Administrationman, but that opportunity didn’t pan out and I was medically discharged from service while I was in Navy basic training. I will write a separate blog about that in the future. I have tried several other opportunities, which obviously didn’t work out but these are the ones most fresh in my memory. Needless to say, I have grown weary of seeking employment and not finding a career to get into.
It has been embarrassing, humiliating even, being a man in my mid-thirties, still struggling to find a viable career. I have, and still do at times, struggle with comparing myself with other people. And it has been a personal crutch of mine for most of my adult life. I have never played the victim and asked “Why me?” But I did ask my parents after they picked me up from the airport upon returning from boot camp, “Why is it so hard for me to find a decent career? That is all I want, is the ability to work a job that I can see myself doing, that I am at least decent at that will make me enough money for myself and hopefully a future family. Why does it seem especially hard for me to find a job?” These are genuine questions I have with no intention of playing the victim. And I feel that potentially one of the biggest reasons is because I am autistic.
Autism tends to have this stigma in society. At least that’s just my observation. And, to be completely honest, Autism isn’t my area of expertise or interest, but I believe that society tends to look down on people who live on the Spectrum. I can’t wrap my head around it as to why that is. Is it because we may at times have a hard time expressing ourselves? Do we come off as a little bit too forward? I am not entirely sure. I do know that most people don’t believe that I have the “tism” as I’ve heard the term called unless I tell them.
I wish people would give autistic people, including myself, a chance. A lot of us are fairly normal people who want to be successful in our own way. But society tends to overlook us, especially in the corporate world, and perceive us to be liabilities instead of assets. I can recall when I was in the separations unit in boot camp. There was a fairly young man who was going to have a job working on nuclear submarines, with a $50,000 sign-on bonus, but immediately lost both his job and bonus because he was autistic. Separations, or SEPS as those in the unit called it, is a legal process where you are separated from the military for whatever reason, usually due to medical or psychological reasons. And the sad thing was that it didn’t really hit this young man as to how much he lost because of it. He just thought “Oh well.” To be honest, I was really disgusted when I heard about that. To lose all of that, and for what? Because he was just slightly more autistic than I am? And pardon my French, it’s complete bullshit. It’s ridiculous because it’s not just the military that treats people on the spectrum like this, it's almost everywhere.
If only they knew some of the creative and ingenious ideas that autistic people can bring to the table. We can be unapologetically honest and may tell you the truth in a harsh and forward way, but it’s not to be rude or inconsiderate, it’s just that we have a hard time lying. If anything, in a society where integrity is almost nonexistent, I would think that honesty would be a great trait to have for a business. Just some food for thought.
I don’t have any particular theme for this particular post. This one is just me putting my thoughts into words. I hope people don’t think that I am some bum who doesn’t have much going on with his life and doesn’t have much to show for it. I have been busting my ass seeking my niche, my calling if you will. I’ve looked into so many opportunities, but nothing concrete has come up yet. But I keep pushing myself because I don’t quit easily. Sure, I have some rough days from time to time, but I keep pressing forward in the hopes that one day I will find something that excites and pushes me to become my best self. And I am hoping that it happens sooner rather than later. That is all I have for today. Take care!
