If you don't know, please shut up about it

I am soooooo mad, livid actually. I've been listening to the debates on CBC radio regarding internships, and I am becoming more and more frustrated with people offering their opinions who really have no insight on the matter. First things first, internships and co-ops are completely different and that should be clarified. Co-ops are organized through schools and you receive school credit for them. Credits are academic currency, and therefore you are getting paid in some capacity. Plus, obviously the work-industry knowledge you learn is very helpful.

Internships, on the other hand, you receive nothing for, aside from industry experience. I am not speaking down to industry experience, although not all internships do offer quality industry experience, especially when there are no school curricula monitoring what the intern is actually learning. Industry experience is important, but the time periods that businesses have placed on this learning period are unfair. The problem is we university graduates enter the industry sitting on top of thousands of dollars worth of debt, debt that we are expected to start paying back 6 months after graduation. The majority of us, however, can't even afford to pay rent and buy groceries for up to a year and a half after graduation and are still expected to happily sign on to 6-12 month unpaid internships and simply be happy for the work experience. And the people who keep telling us this are sitting on top of nice paychecks in their cozy homes with their yummy groceries and they keep telling us that this is just the way it is and to suck it up. I've done the run around and I'm sick and tired of it. I did a 4 year internship with a music magazine while still in school thinking it would give me a writing portfolio and experience to give me a leg up once I graduated; I’m still unemployed. I did a 4 month internship with a literary agency; I’m still unemployed. I did a 3 month internship with a PR agency; I’m still unemployed. I am currently half way through a 6 month internship with a fashion magazine, and yes you guessed it, I’m still unemployed. The industry keeps on spitting out this lie to us that industry experience is important and that internships will lead to a full time job. This is simply not the case, especially in my field of work. The majority of publications these days survive on free work done by interns and minimally paying for freelance work, very few actually hire staff writers. I can name at least 20 publications that I personally know don’t pay a cent for any of their content. How is that legal? To have an entire publication running and making a profit off of the free work of so many people? And the sad part is that if all of these people who are working for free decided to stop doing it, hundreds will come up out of the woodwork and take their places. It’s sick.

Possibly the worst part, on top of not being able to actually provide for ourselves, is being berated for not prioritizing properly at any point that we put our menial paid jobs that we HAVE to take on the side in order to live, above our internships. I understand that they want our absolute best work and our undivided attention, but you know what.....I’m sorry but unless you are going to pay me enough to make sure that I'm not homeless and starving, you don't get my best work or undivided attention because I HAVE TO WORK A REAL JOB TO SURVIVE!!! I am a very dedicated worker and I will always put forth the best work that I possibly can, but I can’t be in two places at once and it is unfair to be mad at me when I can’t be at your beckon call because I’m…..no, not slacking off…..at work! All I ever do is work and it seems to be getting me nowhere.  

What is more, I've had internship positions where I am doing way more than is part of an internship job description. If I am doing as much work as the full-time associates, I should be getting paid the same amount, or at least getting paid fairly, or at all. In this particular instance too, I knew just as much if not more than the people I was working for, so you can’t say that we are learning valuable skills from others who are more skilled than us, because sometimes that is just not true. All I learned from this particular position was that I would never be caught dead working permanently for this company or in this vein of work.

The bottom line is that unpaid internships are exploitation and you can't dress it up any other way. We can't get the internships without going to school first, and we can't get the job without going through around what feels like a million internships first, so what do you expect from us? We are angry and frustrated, living well below the poverty line, and drowning in debt that we can’t actually make a dent in. I can’t afford the basic necessities to live and I am working my butt off for free and then working myself sick at a minimum wage job that I am two university degrees overqualified for just to get by. I'm already in my third round of repayment assistance (which is a freeze payment on my student loans because I don’t bring in enough money to make the minimum monthly payments). You know what this means? It means that while I work my butt off doing two or three unpaid internships at the same time just to add work experience to my resume, and work my part-time minimum wage job, I’m collecting a crap load of interest on my loan balance. As if the original debt wasn’t bad enough, it just keeps on growing the longer I do this merry-go-round of unpaid internship after unpaid internship.

So please, I beg you, all of you who are sitting comfortably in your job and are essentially saying that we are just spoiled little brats who don’t see the value in what you are offering and only place value on dollar signs, please please please shut up! Or better yet, please take 6-12 months of your time working for free and then tell me that this is reasonable. And don’t give me the excuse “we all did it, that’s just the way it is.” I don’t accept that. It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve been out of school now for over a year and I have no paid job prospects. I’m sitting on a Master’s degree and have no paid job prospects. That tells me that something is seriously wrong with the way we are doing things. I got sick a few weeks back and had to pay for antibiotics that I couldn’t actually afford because I have no more school coverage and no work coverage. I had to dish out $150 that I didn’t have, just to be able to be healthy enough to go to work for FREE!!!!!! It is infuriating, it is debilitating, and it is down-right wrong and utterly depressing. I’m living off of credit cards, so just accumulating more debt, just to get by. So please, stop talking about us like we are lazy and entitled. We are just tired of being overworked and undervalued, and living from day to day wondering if we will be able to meet our needs. Some days we don’t even know if we will have enough money to get into work; the work place where we are expected to happily work for free. Maybe in your world where everyone is getting help from mommy and daddy people can afford the luxury of working for a year for free, but that is not my world, and I would argue that it actually isn’t the world that most of us live in. So, we are forced to make a hard decision: try to get by and work for free with the hope of getting a paid job somewhere down the line, or work instead two to three crappy minimum wage jobs. Both of those options sound pretty depressing don’t they? 

I haven't given up hope, but part of my new hope is that unpaid internships will be ruled illegal in Canada and we will be given a better shot at making a life for ourselves. I know that this means less internship work experience will be available for new graduates, but the way I see it is....if these current internship opportunities aren't doing us much good right now anyway, then they won't really be missed when they're gone. Something's gotta give. 

 

It's All a Matter of Perspective

I’m not sure why this is, but when I get sick and have to spend days lying in bed recuperating, I tend to take stock of my life.  I re-evaluate what I am doing, what I want to be doing, if I’m happy. I suppose this happens because I have slowed down and am rid of distractions. Distractions are my coping mechanism though, and are often very welcome because introspection can tend to be slightly difficult. Well, I have been sick for the past couple of days, and therefore I have been re-evaluating.

Interestingly enough, my friends all seem to be taking stock of their lives at the same time, and what they have shared has been pretty inspiring. From my cousins to my brothers and many of my friends, it seems that everyone is sharing today how happy and blessed they feel.

I have indeed been happier lately too, which some friends have noticed and commented on. I suppose that is mostly due to the fact that I can actually pay my rent and am working. Perhaps it is more than that too, though. Since I have been taking things one day at a time and enjoying myself instead of worrying about my career and my next step, the doom and gloom that I emanated months before has subsided. I still feel guilty at times that I haven’t been diligently looking for work in my field, but I know that putting some of that anxiety behind me for a while was exactly what I needed. I cannot change my situation by worrying, so I am trying to simply live the moments that I’m in and stay open for the ones to come. My biggest goal as of late was to simply not worry. This doesn’t mean that I’m giving up on any of my goals; I’m simply not allowing my future goals to control my present happiness.

And yet, some might say I have lacked certain motivation as of late. At times this may be true, and maybe I am even letting my present work situation distract me, but my end goals are still the same and I know that when the opportunity presents itself I will grab on with both hands and will be extremely motivated to follow through.

Right now I am focused on enjoying myself, on staying happy and positive, making the right connections, and learning something new. I feel like everything I go through teaches me something, and I have learned a lot (particularly about myself) over the last couple of months.

Bringing this back to taking stock of my life though, there are some things in particular that I struggle with that I want to actively change, and I have been learning through my friends that this is possible. One friend that has inspired me has just gone through one of the most exciting and also most heartbreaking years of his life. He has come out of it feeling incredibly blessed, happy, vibrant, and capable of being open to love and goodness. Frankly he is one of the most positive and upbeat people I have ever met and I really admire him. He has had so many negative obstacles come about that would get anyone down, but he chooses to focus on the positive and to be happy. I feel like there is so much that I can learn from him. He mentioned two things that really resonated with me: his ability to find meaning in his life, and his ability to love openly. These are two things I struggle with on a daily basis.

I have let external circumstances dictate the meaning in my life, whether it’s a lack of a job in my field or a lack of a significant other, I keep on feeling like something is missing and that my life is somehow less meaningful due to these absences. The rational side of me knows that this is wrong and that my life is meaningful if I am creating meaningful experiences, but I constantly feel like I am in a holding pattern waiting for something truly meaningful to happen.

My biggest shortcoming, though, is my inability to create meaningful relationships. I keep everyone at a distance, even my own family. I don’t even think my parents would really know what was going on in my life if they didn’t read my blog. And even then, there are obviously a lot of things I don’t post on here. It is very hard for me to love openly, and so I tend to push people away or not let them get too close, and then I wonder why I feel so alone. I know that I do this to protect myself, but this defence mechanism to keep me from getting hurt is often what hurts me the most. If you cannot trust and depend on people, you are destined to live a very lonely life. If someone likes me, I run, if they don’t like me, I agonize over why. I don’t like this quality about myself and it has been something I have been working on changing for a while.

I know that my problem falls somewhere on an axis of possessing an incessant need to look outside of myself for meaning and validation, and (somewhat in opposition) a refusal to depend on anything outside of myself for happiness. It is a kind of catch 22, if I refuse to allow my happiness to depend on transient things, but also cannot be happy without those transient things, then how can I ever be happy? The reality is that things do end, people come and go from your life, but does that make these experiences or the interactions you have had with these people any less meaningful? If we never make friends or form intimate relationships because we know there is a high probability that those connections will eventually be severed, then really what is the point of living? Our lives themselves are intrinsically transient – we are here one day and gone the next. So unless we are going to consider life itself meaningless, which I don’t believe any of us would, then there is value in the transient.  For example, I am not in touch with any of my friends from gradschool anymore, but the year I spent out east from gradschool was one of the best years of my life. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. It is sad to see people come and go, sure, but the fact that you got to know them at all is a real blessing.   

So, in the nature of re-evaluating myself and my life, I am going to aim to enjoy the moment, to learn from it, to focus on the positive and try not to worry about the negative, and to appreciate the value and beauty of all of the little moments. In the end I think life just might be an accumulation of little moments. If you are constantly waiting around for the big ones to happen, then you miss out on the small ones happening daily and you miss out on your life.

Thank you to all of you who are showing me this daily. I appreciate each and every one of you.