Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

what if I don’t like lemonade?

This past Wednesday, I arrived home from work, exhausted and grateful the day was over. Wednesday is Senior Day at the natural food market, and the seniors go crazy for their supplements, Moroccan lentil soup with a demi-baguette, and their ten percent off their purchase. While most are lovely, some really make you wonder why respecting the elders never goes both ways.

I make relatively good money at this job. It’s over double the federal minimum wage, and as I live at home, it’s all accumulated in my savings. And my coworkers are friendly and most are around my age — something I’ve dearly missed since being out of school. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about going back to live in your hometown after school, it’s that you realize the demographics. In Maine, everyone who lives here seems to be retired. And if they aren’t, they’re Republicans.

Even though I don’t mind my job and my situation, it isn’t where I expected to be, and it’s nowhere close to where I want to be. Though I’m not sure I really had any sort of expectation to begin with.

When I got home on Wednesday and was nursing a fat glass of water while my mom watched TV with her laptop on her lap, we got to talking about my day. Most of it was filled with half-truthful complaints, and the other bits of pure exhaustion.

And then she asked me if I have a dream job.

I really hate this question. Most of all, I hate it because while I was in school, my dream job was to write for the magazine WHALEBONE, but the magazine was sold to a bigger company before I graduated, losing its spark and my interest.

But before then, I didn’t have a dream job. My dreams of jobs seemed to pop up like hobbies or crushes, thought over until I wore them out and abandoned them. I remember that, as a child, I wanted to be a veterinarian. Then I wanted to be a teacher. Then COVID hit.

Suddenly, it was time to think about college. I had never thought about college, I guess. I really thought this was universal until everyone started talking about their top choice like this was common knowledge. There was no hierarchy for the schools I wanted to apply to. The only colleges I was knowledgeable about were BYU (Mormon upbringing) and University of Hartford (the college my parents met at).

Mia Goulder going to college was something I didn’t care about until I was at the edge of the mountain, looking over the side and wondering where the bridge was at.

I applied to a few schools for different things: education, art, English, and writing. I’d written a 95,000-word manuscript from the first summer of the pandemic until the winter of 2021, so writing had snuck in as a potential major.

Writing became my goal. I went through four years of college, writing everything from cover letters, grants, and resumes to short stories, horror stories, and op-eds. My classes were two-and-a-half-hour chunks in which my peers critiqued my work, and I critiqued theirs. Four years of real writing, all the while my professors and parents told me that every company needed writers.

That was until AI snuck into every crevice of every company and killed them all.

Suddenly, the skills I’d spent years perfecting were reduced to nothing via a tool that was supposed to innovate and excite. Not only were my skills erased, but my jobs were too.

I fear that with the eradication of the writing career path, I’ve become passionless. My dream job is now anything that pays enough for me to afford the cost of living.

There’s a line in the new FX show Adults where 25-year-old Billie starts applying to random companies. In the episodes where her friends ask her why she’s applying to a glue company, she responds with, “I could want to work in glue.”

I could want to work as an assistant to alumni relations. I could want to be a copywriter for an insurance agency. I could want to work as a barista. I could want to work as a receptionist for a law firm.

I could want a corporate job.

Right?

But here I have all these lemons. Each lemon is a skill I’ve learned. Writing. Tone. Professionalism. Editing. Not to mention the skills my odd jobs have given me: customer service and book sales and teaching and marketing and the tourism industry. All of these lemons equate to a very sour lemonade.

The problem is that I have all these lemons — skills, I should say — but I don’t like the taste of lemonade. I wanted coffee.

But I guess with how the economy is, I should just make the lemonade and suck it down, because at least I’m quenching the thirst?

I may be getting lost in the metaphor now, but the point remains the same. My dream job no longer exists. The era where Andie Anderson from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days writes a column is a fantasy now.

I still exist, though. And I’ll keep writing this blog until someone looking for a twenty-three-year-old with a bit of wit and depression finds it. Maybe then I’ll brew a pot of coffee while having a lemon meringue pie on the side.