Narrative Journalism: The Hellscape of Nothingness

The clock ticks away, but it’s rather meaningless. Around me, the world shifts and changes, but I remain the same. Time and space exist, but they have no effect on anything. The only certainty in everything is that things will always have a chance to get worse.

I feel an iron heel pressing at my throat, ever harder. In all of this, it is of utmost importance that I keep up my faith and confidence in my abilities, all the while cold claws constantly rip away at whatever remains of either. At all times, a murky root of dread grows at the back of my neck, seeping a sinister simulacrum of terror to my mind.

Do I really have to submit and give up any and all pride I ever had? Am I forced to admit that despite all the gifts I have been given, I am ultimately unable to become what I want to be?

Enter the consuming reality of a full-time job seeker. The hellscape of nothingness.

Everything began when a fixed-term job I was working ended and I was not offered a follow-up that was on the paper during the entirety of my stint as a project worker. “We’ll surely renew it, if we get the funding”, the saying went, but even as the funding was secured, nothing happened.

I was good at what I did. I knew it myself, and if all of my colleagues and superiors at work didn’t just collectively lie to me, they too were appreciative of my work. The only logical conclusion as to why my input was no longer needed was an overestimate of need in hands working communications. At first, I felt cut out, but soon enough content with the fact that I could freely seek new challenges from different environments, as no matter how well I fared there, it never truly fired me up. I mostly felt like I was just exchanging my skill for monetary compensation – a fair footing to begin on, but far from ultimate fulfillment. Excitement struck me: what would I become next?

Nothing.

As I ventured into the world of a graduated full-time job seeker with some professional experience to back myself up, I was very confident in my ability to land a new job within a couple dozen tries at most. So I thought, as after all, I had needed just short of 40 attempts to get my first one when I hadn’t even graduated yet. Back then it had felt exhausting, but little did I know it was just a taste of what was to come in January 2023.

I had felt a drizzle, expecting a similar experience. I was thrown right into the eye of the storm.

Venturing Into the Hellscape

Now, as I am writing this, we are halfway past February in 2024. If this text is released on a later date, you’ll get to witness how being lost into this world affects me when everything non-mandatory gets delayed. I’m shambling in the same bog I fell into well over a year ago at this point, and the few sparks of light that break this staying gloom gently waft away just as suddenly as they appear.

I lost definitive track of my progress in early April last year when opening the Excel file I had kept up for statistical reasons started making me ache physically. With an error margin of a dozen applications both ways, I’m roughly 250 attempts in, void of any success.

That’s ¼ of a thousand. If you discount holiday periods and weekends, when new job openings are posted seldom, if at all, it’s approximately an attempt every day.

My attempts haven’t been half-assed. I haven’t created a recyclable application template in order to always ensure that I’m fully focused at what I’m doing. Creativity is one of the most powerful tools at my disposal, so I use it as my attempt to stand out of the crowd, inventing the wheel over and over again no matter how extremely exhausting it feels sometimes.  

I’m by no means a pure-blooded linguist, even though my background is in studying Finnish, but there are principles I hold important. Judas Iscariot has already reserved his special place in Hell for what he did, and by no means will I ever betray my expertise so hard that I would let an AI-powered tool describe me instead of doing it myself. I’m no one to deny that it has a myriad of uses, but it’ll never replace my own creativity.

So let that sink in. Two hundred and fifty well-refined attempts, some of which are pure masterwork in the genre of job applications. I didn’t even come up with the definition – I just showed some of my brighter attempts to a better-knowing, moderately experienced human resources acquaintance, who was amazed that none of them bore fruit. Thirteen times and counting did I manage to enter the screening process at some degree, and no feedback I ever got was bad. If someone wanted to make an argument about my former colleagues teaming up to insincerely give praise to my work, it could be logically backed up, even if completely without a motive. Considering the fact that these famous thirteen attempts come completely promiscuous from a massive pool of application processes, there’s no valid reason to believe the feedback I have scraped together is untrue. There has to be a seed of truth in it.

Even if the seed is infertile, it’s there.

I have to be doing something right. There’s reason to believe that even a random occurrence would net me something at this point. Sheer dumb luck, to put it bluntly. Something is clearly off, though, so we pick up the shovels and we dig deeper.

Take the poet’s guiding hand, for this will spiral deep.

With Betraying Birthmarks

To understand how we wound up here, we have to go back into my past. I might as well be talking about “us”, for if you have read this far, you’re in this with me. We’ll travel further than should ever be necessary, because I want to be completely stripped of doubts and misleading expectations when the sentence of execution is given. Awe befall upon those, who have the courage to slay an unarmed man!

My first “real” job as a graduated professional was in the public sector, working as a project communications coordinator. I did not have much bite to back up the bark, but my former employers did trust in my abilities, and would later proceed to reap the rewards. Before that, I had mostly done volunteer work, freelance work and shorter summer stints, some of which had to do with communications and some of which didn’t. During my university studies I spent a couple of summers catching up on studies so that even if I didn’t do anything “meaningful”, I would not fall behind on my study schedule.

As a communications professional, I was in charge of planning and executing communications for multiple projects, funded either by the state or by the European Union. Because the organization was small, and teams consisting of just a handful of people did not make breakthrough achievements on a daily basis, I was lent out as a resource to other contexts as needed. My direct superior ran the entire organization, which meant that they would often spend the entire day running from meeting to another, so if they needed help in executive tasks, I was put on them.

Sometimes some of our projects would cooperate with even smaller organizations that had absolutely nobody specializing in communications, so informative tasks were relegated to me. I tend to say that I was baptized in fire as I entered my job, because I began my work during the summer holiday period, which meant that the collective three offices the organization had were empty for the most part, save for me. A freshly graduated professional, lacking the guidance of a superior specialized in my own field. During the summer holiday periods, I had pretty much no one guiding me. My closest colleague had taken unpaid leave to do something more important.

In an empty office, under the baking heat of the summer, alone amidst the clatter of renovating drills, I worked the first communications strategy the organization had seen.

Lo and behold. I had thought that I was doing something very challenging – daring, even – for my stature, but the passing year had taught me one thing.

I can no longer think of myself as being somehow special when I read storybooks to other kids in kindergarten when I was 5 years old. It seems as if that was the age when most other job seekers of my field were drafting their first communications strategies. It felt like an achievement when I represented it to the organization in the first convent of the fall season. Now it mostly feels like a crown jewel in a crown made of cardboard.

We have to go further to understand.

I believe – as for all that is holy, I can honestly no longer remember – that I was in the 8th grade when what I was meant to become dawned on me. I was fascinated by literature and interested in everything textual, and absolutely admired many of my teachers back then. I was certain I wanted to join their ranks. In high school, my Finnish teachers would just fuel the fire in me. Thanks to those mighty fine ladies, I felt like I had found what I was born for.

But there is no truth in faith; no sanctity in wishes.

While I just completely made that up, it’s somewhat true that my instinct did indeed betray me. It wasn’t much of a burden for me to get accepted to university – on the second try, that was, when I actually bothered to skim through the material books for the entrance exams. I was on the right trail, ready to become the best me, a font of knowledge serving the young and eager.

It would not take terribly long to dawn on me that the points of interest on the scientific side of language were scattered few and far between for me. Granted, I never failed a course, and while not everything felt interesting, I definitely had my moments. I especially loved the science behind texts, I liked folk linguistics, felt comfortable with semantics and semiotics and even enjoyed a course of literary science here and there. It was enough to keep up the illusion that this was indeed where I was meant to be.

And so, eventually, my pedagogic studies kicked off.

I was beyond excited. I had waited to witness that world for nearly a decade, and I was bursting with eagerness and creativity. I even bought a laptop so that I could write notes with such piety I had not witnessed in myself for many years – probably dating back to the point when my teachers would silently just let me not do them in upper comprehensive. They noticed I would be prime no matter if I did them or not. Now, however, I was doing all that was being requested, all that was being recommended, and even beyond that.

My journey as a teacher-in-training went well. After all, why would it not? I was always good at picking up new things, and while I did get the odd piece of constructive criticism here and there, I was quick to polish off any rough edges in my professionalism-to-be. In the last part of my teacher studies, I was guided by the very same teacher that had become my Finnish teacher when I started upper comprehensive almost precisely a decade before that moment. We rejoiced in the reunion, and under their guiding light I was fleshed out to become ready, eventually showered in their praise for my ingenious and devoted approach to birth new methods of education from the endless forge of my creation.

But that phoenix burned to ash, only to remain so ever since.

As essentially the entirety of my teacher studies happened during the pandemic lockdown, there’s not much to recall. Frankly, nearly the entirety of the year is foggy in my mind because of what followed, but I vividly remember as I left the training school for the last time after the final meeting with our group in final training.

I felt relieved. At first relief felt mostly like itself, relieving, but it soon dawned on me that not everything was right. I should have felt confident in myself, essentially ready to start a career in education once I would finish the rest of my studies, but I mostly just felt glad that I wouldn’t have to return. Surely, I couldn’t safely feel like that, as I eventually would return, right? I’d Return “behind the table” in teacher terms, with no end in sight.

Terror struck me. My knees failed me right in the middle of my kitchen. I had done what I was supposedly born for, over the period of one year, during which my responsibilities were nominal compared to those who worked the field on a daily basis. Doing just this, my candle was burned so bad the flame was close to licking my fingers at that point. I was mauled by the realization: this wasn’t what I was born for. Sure, when I put in the effort, my prowess was magnificent, but the fulfillment was nowhere to witness. I rolled the years back in my mind to the moment when I was a teenager, studying in the very same school I had just finished my teacher training in, and remembered: certainly we would make fun of any and all mistakes the teachers in training made, but did we actually ever appreciate the effort when they did something right?

I could not recall a single time. Not from the time when I was a teenager, and not from the time I had to herd the teenagers myself. Only if effectively forcing the kids could we reap any useful feedback from them. The best interaction I could define was a moment of mutual respect when a group of boys studying Finnish as a secondary language listened with genuine interest as I explained the operational principles of the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. That was the only time an encounter with the youth was better than what basic human decency demands. During what was essentially an entire year. No matter the fault was, if I would have stayed on that track, it wouldn’t have been good for anyone. Both I and them deserved a better fit.

Therefore, I reinvented myself. To understand what should have been all along, we will have to enter the root of me. Stay with me, for I swear, I’m young enough that there’s not much history to go back to until we return to be pelted by the present.

Under Shooting Stars and the Scorching Sun

Hell do I know what the celestial bodies did when I was born, but June of 1997 in Finland was hot. I am the first and only child of a nurse and a salesperson who dropped high school after just a couple of months, so no sign showed to what I was become. I was the new member of two hard-working bloodlines. Honest working class, if we are exact. It just so happened that I was given large hands that are soft and practically useless, but also a big head that functions lightning-fast.

Three was the number of full years behind me when I learned to read, mostly just by staring at text and coming to terms with how it worked. Another year passed, and I learned how to write. By the age of five I had learned rudimentary English, and by the age of six me and my best friend back then were speedrunning first and second-grade math exercise books. During that same year of my life, I first entered a rather large-scale mental arithmetic contest that was annually held in my home city. After winning in my own series four times consecutively, I gave up because my interest waned as competition was nowhere to be found. Around then, my unchallenged prosperity in all kinds of writing contests would also begin to raise its head from the sand.

At the same time, I avoided untying my shoelaces because it took me ages to tie them again. Anytime I was given a blunt or a sharp object, I’d get more bruises and incisions than successful strokes. Luckily for me, no one in the world no longer thought I’d be someone giving my hands and my strength for respectable manual labor. Save for perhaps my father, but the difference between my dad and steel is that steel can be bent by applying enough force.

I was always more or less a special child. I was extremely gifted in the things I was good at, and rather miserable in whatever I didn’t like. Back when I myself hadn’t come up with a realistic idea of what to do with my life, no one else knew better, for I had the framework in place to become practically anything. I received lots of queries of whether I would become a doctor, an astronaut, a lawyer or a president – basically whatever the person in question thought to be the most demanding thing they could imagine.

As my identity started to take shape skillwise in my late teen years, it was pretty obvious that I would roll with something that used language as a primary resource. It had been obvious for years that manual labor, be it either physically demanding or artisan-like, would never be my forté. The mathematician in me had died upon understanding how dull science was to someone who felt the world around in colors, shapes, adjectives, scents and other things of the sort. The closest thing I could ever have been had I followed in the footsteps of my family on my father’s side would have been an architect, as it was artistic enough for me and had enough to do with construction. Naturally, I applied once at some point, but lost interest fast as I came to terms that my hand would never recreate what my mind painted, and that would make a really shit architect.

Words were what it had to be, and so it still remains.

And now, breathe. We return to the end of the Year of our Lord 2020. I emailed my university directive teacher, and basically asked “what the fuck do I do now?” Even though my life during my later years was more often than not painted with misfortune, I was very fortunate and extremely grateful to get yet another wonderful teacher to take care of me. Together, we deciphered what I would do next: say a comprehensive goodbye to a deep educational career and turn into communications and marketing.

It felt right. It did not feel like a teenage epiphany of finding what I was good at, but rather finding what I actually wanted to do. Not because I had succeeded and being praised as an affirmation, but because challenges were ahead and I enjoyed them, despite not knowing if they would be easy.

At that point, there was no point to divert the course of my career completely. Instead, I picked up whatever relevant I could still fit to my personal curriculum, and kindly put, slew the shit out of the secondary subject of international business communications. I liked it, I was good at it, it challenged me to learn and for the first time in what felt like eons I was not enervated after finishing with it. I was eager and hungry to prove what I was capable of. A year and a half passed, I graduated, and went to work.

So we leave behind what has been and we are back here.

The Price of Pride

Since the thin red line of trying to make sense in this outcry is my current situation as an unwillingly unemployed person, let me get into how I introduce myself to the eldritch-seeming entities that the pious and proven know as human resources specialists.

I’ve done my professional work as a communications specialist, and during my studies as a mish-mash of what could be best described as a content creator of some sorts. I’ve always ended up in situations where I have had to punch way above my weight, but not once has it been my jaw that first hits the floors – it’s always the so-called challenge.

I like to work in environments where my first-hand resource is language and text in some form. That’s why I like communications, and on the marketing side of things I’m interested in content creation, advertising and event hosting over analytics and budgeting. My proficiency is almost bilingual – not to say that my English would by any means be perfect, but it’s damn difficult to challenge by anyone else than a talented professional of the field or a native speaker.

Finnish, on the other hand, is a different story. Many of my colleagues like a certain poetic metaphor saying that the language is a window and a house they live in, and that it is their skin. To me, it is a mind-tearing superweapon. At first glance it can be a music box that sends its recipient to a delightful lullaby. Within a blink of an eye it can shift its shape all the way into a scourge that lashes at the mind so sharply that it bleeds for nights to come years after. It will make the crowd bow, and it’ll make them dance. It defines the way we see reality and alters everything we believe to be good and bad, or true and false. It is the skin everyone lives in, that I flay from the miscreants, and the house and window I tear down upon those who bear testament to my triumph.

Aside from language and texts, I’m also good with other things that have some work-related applications. I’ve spent a great deal of my life with digital appliances, so software comes in two shapes: ones that I know and ones that I’ll get to know once I’ll use them a couple of times. I’m very well used to long-term projects, no matter if there’s a multitude of them, and I have no problem working them with others or by my own. I may no longer work with higher mathematics, but I’m sufficiently good with statistics and I remain lightning-fast with arithmetics. Even though I no longer want to pursue a career in education, I’m still good at it, and only better when the crowd’s motivation to behave and listen increases. And may God help whoever hasn’t by now realized that my greatest asset is definitely my creativity.

I want to go far. I want to advance on my career, from a specialist to a senior, to a manager, all the way to a chief executive operating what-the-fucking-ever is the highest rank of working with content production. I’m content to start where everyone essentially starts their professional career, and that’s where the arrows blot out the sun but my shield is nowhere to found.

If I have learned one thing – as I’ve learned many, but picking one is always an achievement in itself – is that I have no experience. I have witnessed or done nothing. Whatever I may be capable of doesn’t matter at all, if I don’t have the spurs to back it up with. Experience comes in a multitude of forms, but what unites all sorts of experience is that it is absolute. It cannot be questioned. Wherever it may come from, the amount of done-this-done-that you have behind your back is far more valuable than whatever cool you can whip up before others can finish a sentence.

Best of all, guess what? I understand why.

I just don’t want to accept that it’s the entire truth. Experience can be quantified, as it’s easy to count: if you shape it into very simple terms, working 5 years gives you 5 experience. My total lifetime experience, out of all that’s reasonable to quantify, is roughly 2. I’m being kicked around the pitch like a football by people who have 10 experience or more. It’s proven, they have the history and the papers to back it up. Naturally nobody gets 10 experience without actually learning anything, but what bites the hardest is that nobody believes what I could do by that point.

I have potential, but as long as I don’t have the experience – or someone with boatloads of experience to vouch for me – it counts for nothing. As the situation is like it is, I’m clearly unqualified for professional works by these terms. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’ve already started a career on the sixth gear, proving anyone doubting wrong. It’s the 2 experience that I have that must feel threatening. I wonder if the people in charge of recruitment processes feel like this makes me a tool that needs to be taught to do the basics for years before being individually useful in anything. All the while, this would consume both the resources from the people who have to do the onboarding, and the salary that I would receive for just watching and drooling. Only that the truth is not like that. I may need to ask for help here and there, but be it basically anything I have applied for, it’s for things that I can easily master after the mandatory onboarding anyone would receive regardless of experience.

So we quantify the price of pride.

I have the pride of a professional. Never did anyone in my upbringing try to ever shape me into an elitist, with everyone always underlining a humble approach. I understand it, as it’s what I’m trying to exercise, but everything has its limits. It makes me wonder if I raise the bar too high, and why is it so, that I’m seen to be unfit even for an assistant position, or even a trainee at best. Most of the work I apply for is by the title of specialist, and that’s because it’s the most commonly available option. Not once have I even bothered to try with any senior or chief position. In the 250 banana kicks behind me are countless assistant positions, the lot supplemented with a dozen or so trainee attempts. It’s not really the level I should be on at this point, but if it’s a field I feel comfortable with and it pays well enough to cover rent, food, utilities and the minimal acceptable amount of student loan amortization.

But it’s too much asked for. I’d settle with taking a step back, but even in a race like this there is always someone better than me. Most often there are so many that I’m not even among the considered.

It comes back to the question: when and where do I finally sell my pride? I’ve searched for work that I deem “suitable”, and the parameters aren’t delusional in my opinion. The job has to pay enough (not much), be related to my skills or my field (I’m sometimes just making the connection up) and not be completely out of my capability and reality. I could clean offices, deliver mail or flip burgers, but who benefits from it, if I’m unmotivated and unwilling to become better at them? It does not help my career in any way, shape or form, and take it as you will, many jobs like that are important if not crucial, yet just not at all what I should be doing. I deeply appreciate clean public spaces and the occasional hangover junk food. Those jobs need hands working them. There’s a plethora of examples like this: jobs that do not really require experience or education. None of them really belong into the pool of things I logically should be doing.

Is it really so that my choice of the wrong expertise means I do not deserve to start anew? I’m not seeking far from what I’m qualified for, as the vast majority of jobs I apply for are literally tailored for people with a similar educational background with a tad bit more communications studies in lieu of literature and/or pedagogics. Marketing stretches it a bit, but it is ultimately just communications tailored for altering consumer behavior. My sweet child, content creation, is the actual fucking thing I was born for back in the day, but who do I kneel before in apology because I didn’t realize it earlier?

Who writes these rules and can we vote them out of their office?

On the Tomb of Dignity

That’s the situation, shortly put. All of this might actually just hit me back harder, because another thing I have learned from the work-related sector is that only success deserves a face. When the heel pushes down on your throat, you will either be crushed under and you bury any dream of career development, or you quietly grind your teeth together never knowing when you will get out.

The last year has not been mentally easy. Being unemployed was quite fun, actually, for the first couple of weeks, because I had no rush anywhere and I could do things at my own pace. Stay in bed if I felt sleepy? Check. Go to the gym at 5 am before I go to sleep? Check. Attend any event wherever and whenever because I had no responsibilities? Check.

At first it was comfy. Then it turned irritating. Annoying. Obnoxious. Excruciating. Unbearable.

Now it just feels hopeless. I have no choice but to keep on trying, running in a hamsterwheel that hardly even goes forward. Continuously, my confidence bleeds from every pore in my skin, but as time passes, more and more of it is needed. At an increasingly rapid pace, I am losing something I would need to gain more of.

I live in a reality where between me and the world around me, a window exists, separating me from the plane everything else exists in. If I want to make a laugh of it, I’m a moving caged monkey, out there for the mockery of others. If I want to make it poetic, I’m a ghost in the blizzard, the bladed snow lashing at my face, falling against an unaltered, unamused expression.

I can concretely feel how my standing with everything has changed. Earlier today – today being the day I write this chapter – I walked home from the grocery store, again in wind and snow. I had woken up after sunset, as has been the case for this winter, the majority of last autumn, and last winter as well. I was waiting by the crosswalk, about to walk over, as a car stopped by the last seconds, the driver obviously upset by “having to” let me pass – as in that case is my right by traffic code. A year and a half back I would probably have been shaken by a close call like that, but I didn’t as much as flinch. “What loss is there to just accelerate?” was painted all over my face as I glanced at the driver, continuing the automated walk back home.

Upsets do not matter anymore. At this point, whenever I examine my email, I just get amused at a record number of failed applications during any given day or week, many of which I hardly recall applying for. All of which, naturally, I have done research for and seen the effort to squeeze the last bit of interest, when in reality it’s often just the truth of job equals salary, salary equals affording a decent standard of living. Of course, sometimes it really stings when the actually interesting chance ends up in a failure because someone else has been equally interested, but has 39 experience more than me.

I feel like I’ve lost meaning. If something stuck with me from my family career-wise, it’s that there is work and it has to be done. There’s also my work, in many shapes, all of which someone else works. My last lifelines are working out at the gym and attending some free-time events with my friends as well as playing video games together. Even if misery could show sharper teeth at me, I feel lonely and unworthy. The feeling of inadequacy as a professional seeps a dark influence to all other areas of life, making me feel like an incompetent friend, a failed son and unfit to be anyone’s partner. I cannot take care of myself the way I would want to, relying on an uncomfortable amount of helping parties. Even if nearly everyone that is helping me would go further lengths to support me, especially my family, discomfort grips my heart. Shame licks my skin with an acidic tongue, and all I can do is curl up and shiver as the pain becomes physical.

That is the reality of being unemployed long-term. I can but imagine the misery of those who have to witness this even longer than I have to. Even if nothing would change in the near future, I would settle for an explanation: what am I doing wrong? If I’m not doing anything wrong, why do I always get the short straw? It’s not like life has been particularly easy on other fronts either, but that’s another five thousand words per topic.

As I’m about to write myself out of this article, essay, or whatever this should be called, a pebble drops from the pile of rocks that burdens my breath. Come a new day, three more take its place. Rest assured, however, knowing that I remain and even if whatever does not kill me would only make me weaker, there’s one truth that will not be taken from me.

Originally, I planned to quote describing lyrics from all over my playlists to pace my story and give a soundtrack to this feeling. I decided against it, because this is my book and I’m writing its paragraphs. A few lines join my jeremiad, lines that have been all too familiar to me before, back when leaving this world was not too far away from me.

This grip loosens but it never breaks

We carry nothing but a name you will forsake

Your words are always there to break my fall

And now I find the comfort to see through it all

(Rise Against – Injection)

No need to show condolences or ask me how I’m doing. I’ll get by, I always do, that’s what the people close to me are for.

Want to do something? Hire me. Just don’t ever question my ability to tell a story.