Burdened

It’s been almost a year since I've had a full time job. This time last year I was finishing up my last few weeks in China as an English teacher. After that I moved back to the States for three months as I worked on getting a finance visa, which then allowed me to move to London. Since getting here I have spent two and a half months on getting married (Dec to Feb) and then four months on getting a residency permit (Feb-May) that will allow me to work here in the UK. Since the time I got my residency permit I have submitted dozens of applications and CVs (resumes) to various companies. I been given multiple interviews and as of now I have only received one job offer. Now that job is a good one and one that I want. It is a substitute teaching job that could lead to a permanent teaching position. The problem is that in order to work with children here I have had to go through multiple criminal background checks from all the countries I have lived in for over six months in the past five years as well as here in the UK. I have applied for checks from the United States, South Korea and the UK. This job was offered to me back in May and I have yet to receive all my criminal background checks back though I sent in the applications within about a week of being offered the job. It has been almost seven weeks of waiting and now after my background check from the States finally showed up (it took them six weeks to process and send it to me) it seemed like I was almost done and ready to start working. The problem is that the school systems here just began their summer break and now there will not likely be any work available until the end of September. During these weeks of waiting I have continued applying for other jobs hoping I could get something so I could at least be making some money during the summer and perhaps give myself a job that I might prefer to the teaching job. But I have yet to find a job and as the days and weeks pass I find myself applying to lesser and lesser jobs, places I wouldn't have even thought about working only a month ago.

Each day that passes seems to bring with it a little more weight that I have to carry as I feel I am letting not only myself down but Priya. Priya has been very supportive but we both know I need to find work soon in order to deal with the new financial burdens that come with marriage. The thing is I’m just not used to struggling this much in order to get a job. The fact is due to my constant moving I've had to look for new jobs fairly often so looking for work is nothing new but what is new is not being able to find it. In the past 5 years I haven’t lived anywhere for more than one year. I have moved six times during that period and only twice have I had a job waiting for me in the place I was moving to. The other four times I have moved to places with nothing waiting for me yet a majority of those times I have been able to find work within a relatively short period of time, three months or so. Of course each time I moved to or within the US I didn't have to worry about applying for a work permit and I could start job hunting right away. Here in London that was not the case so it would obviously take more time for me to get a job here yet since I have been eligible to work here I have sent in more applications and been on more interviews here than in all the other places I’ve lived. The truth is most of my experiences in job hunting have been fairly positive and successful. Really I had become fairly used to being offered a job after getting an interview. I've even turned down a few job offers in that time. But here in London I have been on several interviews and have been rejected by all of them or at least not contacted again. I even had one job that brought me in for a day of on the job testing only to be sent home half way through the day being told I was not “right” for them. I wrote about that experience earlier in this blog take a look here if you want to see what happened. All of that is to say I’m not used to failing so often as I seem to be failing here and beyond just the worries that come from not having a source of income the feeling of rejection brings with it a unique and significant weight all its own.  

Now I don’t know what the immediate future holds in store for me but I admit I am not very optimistic as new problems continue to pop up and little hope seems to be in view. All I can do now is keeping looking for work and cross my fingers that things get better.