An Introduction of Sorts

This should have been my first post, but I wasn't feeling up to writing much last night. About a year ago, I was working at an almost perfect job. I got to proof, edit and write. I knew I was good at what I did and I knew that I helped make our company and the products we published better. Then, they sold the company and after a couple months of searching, I found myself working at an advertising agency. It only took me a few weeks to realize that I wasn't cut out for that cut-throat world. So I started looking for something, anything, else. Unfortunately, by this time the economy was already taking a turn for the worse and I ended up getting laid off (due to a "decrease in workflow") in September before ever getting the chance to tell the HR Lady where they could stick their stupid job.

Now I feel as though I'm back where I started three and a half years ago. Straight out of college, with people telling me that I'm over-qualified for office work (admin assist positions, etc.) but without enough experience to go anywhere in my chosen field. With so many people flooding the job market, no one wants an employee who needs to be trained at all. They want employees who already know exactly how to do their job and exactly how to use their programs. It doesn't matter if I can do what they need, only if I've done it before. Which leaves me floating in an abyss wondering just what I want to do with the rest of my life. I know I don't want to be an advertising proofreader. It's a dead-end career with no room for advancement and lots of room for misery because so many companies (my former place of employment a prime example of this) have designated the copy editing department as official company scapegoat. But I don't know if going back to school is a good option either. Yeah, I could teach at the college level, but only if I can remember enough high school math to pass the GRE and figure out what I want to study. I can keep trying to break into technical writing and real editing, but the problem is that Dallas is not a publishing hub, either in print or online.

So welcome to my quarter-life crisis. It's probably going to be a bumpy ride as this life is experiencing turbulence right now. I'm not five years old any more, so it's not as easy as going up to my mom and saying, "Mom, when I grow up, I'm going to be the first female president-nurse-librarian-scientist-writer!"