this is me trying

The title and section titles are lyrics of the song this is me trying by Taylor Swift.

I’ve been having a hard time adjusting

I started my blog in high school because I was very depressed with bad thoughts, no where else to express what I felt and no one to turn to. The blog became a companion as I navigated my early 20s with even more depressive episodes in a foreign country. I stopped posting a lot because I found joy in the real world and refused to dwell in my writing because it tends to bring out unwanted emotions. I am back now, but calmer.

I had the shiniest wheels, now they’re rusting

Four years ago, Taylor Swift released the album ‚Folklore‘. It was the only thing I listened to that August. I was sharing an apartment just outside my old university in Bremen with a friend and essentially took over the smart TV so it only played the entire Folklore album‘s lyric videos from start to finish every morning to evening. I was very stressed back then. I had just graduated and was looking for the next opportunity. The previous month (July) had been tough, but August was starting to feel better. I did a written test which was the first part of the hiring process for an internship I wanted so badly. The waits in between the different hiring stages were excruciatingly long and at the time I wasn’t aware that this was normal. By the time September was around the corner, with no indication that I was going to the interview stage, I was in panic mode. So I booked a one-way 16-hour bus trip to from Bremen (Northern Germany) to Austria. My final destination, Leoben, a small city of less than 25,000 people somewhere in the Alps. I spent 5 weeks there.

Most of the Austria subplot ends well; I got the internship of my dreams and made friends along the way. I had a great time and I felt like I finally had a foot in the energy sector‘s door. I was in. Things went uphill from there. After that, I worked at a research institute, a well-known international development organization, and another world renowned climate research institute. I thought my career in this sector was a sure thing, but it seems that the job market has other plans for me.

So I got wasted like all my potential

I look back at all these cool places I worked at and I can’t help but be grateful for the one person who hired me as an intern at the UNFCCC back in the summer of 2019 when all I had to my name was a high school diploma. That was my true „in“ and is what inspired me to want to work in some variation of climate action. I was just a 22-year old learning the ways of the world, drinking a little too much with my fellow interns after work, and having a life-changing experience. This is also the time one of this blog‘s readers, a stranger back then, reached out to me to discuss an article I wrote here. The stranger has become a very important part of my life *wink wink*.

This past June, I graduated from my master’s program. There are a lot of mixed feelings about my experience, but what I can write here is that I learned something, I did cool things and I met amazing people even though this took some time. Strangely, the first thing I think of about this time is dancing in a club to Amapiano with my uni friends. Now it’s been almost 5 months since my last class. I‘m exhausted because I was delusional and I thought I had it in me to get a job soon after graduation (or maybe even before). It’s October and here we are. Again, I‘m in a small city in the Alps; this time on the French side – making friends and doing who knows what. I‘m trying to figure out why someone hated me so much that they told me to apply for a job and then rejected me without interviewing me and then hired someone way less qualified for the position than me. (OK, so I found this out because I did some digging on LinkedIn, the cursed website). Also, I’m paying for LinkedIn Premium LOL. I got a sweet discount for two months when I signed up via desktop. It lets you “InMail” people you’re not connected to. Probably annoying for those on the receiving end of these mails, but whatever to make you feel like you’re making the effort.

I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying

Rejection is redirection, they say. So I hope this phase redirects me to somewhere where I never have to deal with such bullshit things again. And, maybe the real find was the realization that the Alps are a place of refuge for me.