How unfair is it to have gone through 13 grades of school, done everything better than anyone else, been involved in an unreasonable number of activities, been the high school valedictorian, gone off to George Washington University, graduated magna cum laude from the GW business school, applied for dozens of jobs and been turned down for every one of them?

You can read the article in the Washington Post about Melissa Meyer, who is currently living back at home with her successful parents, getting no end of s**t from her successful siblings, and is trying to come to terms with the nearly unacceptable fact that doing everything according to The Plan for a Super Successful Adulthood has not worked out in the slightest. If you string out the factual bits in a line, you’ll see that they go against every property of matter and all laws of nature and physics.

She works the counter in a record store selling CDs and incense and spends her nights working as a hostess in a restaurant. She’s killing herself trying to find a job; she shot for the starlit jobs all GW business school grads are expected to apply for, and is now mucking about in the bottom of the barrel along with all but the handful of fellow GW graduates who won the For God’s Sake, Please Hire Me lottery.

She’s been at it for months and is wanting to take the universe’s big fat hint and just go be something else for a while. Travel that’s totally unrelated to success is her goal. She has certainly paid her dues and moved as many mountains as she could find. Life is short, and rarely works out the way you planned it. I hope she can let go a little and can have a grand and wholly deserved adventure.

Further Reading:

Fallout Life, Interrupted

Posted by Alexa Harrington