If you’re unhappy with life…

When I decided that I wasn’t going to Edmonton, I told myself two things:

1- I would look for a job every single day until January 31st
2- I would try something different if I didn’t get a job by February 14th

From December 26th until January 30th, I applied for job every. single. day. I applied for job training programs, I applied to work as a receptionist, as a secretary in both the legal and non-legal fields. I began to get desperate and applied at McDonald’s and Tim Horton’s and Starbucks. I was getting more and more depressed and each day when I would go onto twitter I would get stressed about not having a job and about not being able to save etc. etc.

The week of January 31st, I got a phone call from Service Canada accusing me of fraudulently applying for EI and overall being incredibly condescending towards me. Am I not a person because I’m on EI? I was not someone who was planning to spend months on EI — I was looking for a job, any job, even if it was, decidedly, below my skills and experience levels.

On January 31st, I had dinner with my parents and I decided that I was better off to try my luck in Alberta after all. I woke up on February 1st with buoyed spirits and began planning my move to Alberta. Again.

That weekend, I had breakfast with a dear friend of mine who put my entire situation into perspective: I was 24 years old, couldn’t find a job, and planned to go to Alberta to work in a Tim Horton’s. Her reasoning was, if I was going to work a “ghetto job”, why not work one somewhere interesting instead of Calgary or Edmonton?

Immediately my plans changed. I have the money, time, youth etc. to travel. I don’t have school, work, family or relationships tying me to Montreal. And so I went to Europe.

Bonjour de Paris!

My entire life has been “Do this, this and this at this time, at this age. Don’t do that, it’s socially unacceptable”. I went to good schools, studied good subjects, took good jobs, saved my money, planned, planned and planned until I was blue in the face. And that’s exactly what I am: Blue.

The problem with planning things is that you can never control all of the variables. By planning to graduate university in 2010 and not finishing until 2012, I created this sense of disappointment in myself that wouldn’t have been there otherwise had I not been trying so hard to control and draw out my entire life’s plan at 17.

This obsessive planning and scheming is exhausting and I’m ready to just live. I am not planning anything more than one week in advance for my entire trip. While I have a few “must see” places on my list, all I know for certain is that I’m here until Wednesday and then I’m off to Madrid to visit a friend of mine from Winnipeg.

Oh and, the day before I left? I got a job that I had interviewed for awhile back. The caveat? They had changed their minds and didn’t want a full-time employee anymore and would it be alright if I worked freelance?

I feel like I have to write something inspiring or whatever but all I want to do is jump up and down about the fact that I worked from a café in Paris yesterday and this is my view right now as I type this: