A needle in a hay stack

We’ve all been there. Searching for that perfect cup of coffee on an autumn day. Or that favorite shirt that would look perfect on you today. Or even your keys in the bottom of your purse. Impossible to find and always the last thing you put your hand on. It’s not exactly an idea that you want to use to describe your recent job search, but yet I still find myself facing the fact that searching for a job is like searching for a needle in a hay stack.

I mean is there something wrong with me?

I’m at the 25 year milestone of my life. I should be starting a career, aka. a long-term or lifelong job, with professional progress along a general path. This is what Google thinks I, a “young professional”, should look like:

This is what I look like:

I'm not anything like those overzealous young professionals, but I am young, and I am trying to be a professional (even if the door to opportunity slams shut in my face more often than not). So doesn't that make me a young professional. So why don't I look like them, why instead do I look like my kitten just got eaten by a mastodon?

Maybe instead this whole reality of a young professional is a skewed opinion. Maybe that image above is what society wanted us to be, but our predecessors didn't leave us with enough opportunity to achieve that success. You can't raise the dead, and you can't revamp an economy that is void of chances. I'm not saying don't try or even that I won't try. I'm still here everyday trying to figure out the next step, but I'm afraid I'm stuck at the bottom of an elevator shaft, with no way up. And what I'm even more afraid of is, I'm down here with all the other young professionals, the next generation of  . . .

Call me the princess and the pea, but I want a reality that is dreamlike. I blame Disney.

I do not want to leave that "next generation of . . ." question completely blank. In any great void, there is always space for new opportunity, however difficult to achieve. So I ask you to ask yourself a question that I ask myself  almost every day (that's a tongue twister): What do I want of my future? Followed by: I have nothing to loose (no money, no house, no collateral), so why don't I go get it?