Terminally Unemployable

A month ago (against my better judgement) I graduated from university. Life since then, rather than being the blur of champagne and cakes that I envisaged, has been an endless procession of people, some of whom I hardly know, asking me questions that are, at once, vague and horribly all-encompassing. The kind of things that, in any other circumstance you simply wouldn’t be able to lead with in polite conversation...

“So” they say “what exactly are you going to do with that life of yours?” 

and 

“Will there be a job? Or will you just be a burden to family and state from here on in?”

I generally try to spit, subtly, at these people but perhaps I wouldn’t be so thorny if I could present them with an actual plan. The fact is I have nothing sensible or realistic to tell them. I haven’t seriously aspired towards any sort of job for about seven years, and I will tell you for why.

When I was in year nine my entire class took an online aptitude test that provided you with a list of all the possible professions (I do mean all of them, French Horn Polisher was an option) and ranked them in terms of suitability based on your answers to a series of questions. These professions were marked with either a green tick (for those jobs that would bring you great happiness and advancement) an orange circle (for the ones you weren’t suited to but could basically muddle along in without anyone noticing) or a red cross (for those jobs you should never under any circumstances enter in to, ever). Unlike the majority of people who second-guessed and calculated their way through the exercise, wanting to be reassured that whatever profession it was that they had their eye on was indeed the one their personality marked them out for, I answered the aptitude questions with complete honesty. 

For my efforts the computer rewarded me with a long list of red. 

I had one orange (Snake Milker, no really, which seemed unviable.) 

It was sobering.

A lot of people were unhappy with what the computer had determined was their ideal career, and sat long faced for the remainder of the PSHE lesson ruminating on their grey futures in poultry wrangling or the professional horn polishing business, but I didn’t even have that to look forward to. At my most open and honest, and with what was surely the most comprehensive list of professions ever compiled to choose from, I had been deemed terminally unemployable. Sure, I could struggle through with the snake milking but I would always know that I was only hanging in there by the skin of my teeth. The other snake milkees, the ones that had got a green tick next to Snake Milker, the ones for whom The Milking was a calling that had ‘chosen them’, would look down on me, and rightly so. 

This all stuck in the craw to such an extent that I basically gave up on aspirations and decided to dedicate what remained of my life to reading. It was working well until a few months ago when my mother pointed out (forcefully) that this was never going to make me any money, and my sister had to sit me down and make me work out exactly what it was I wanted to do. “Satire?” I said after a while this was dismissed as about as viable as the snake milking “Give me a break, Jonathan Swift” my sister said “what did you want to do before you became a posturing and delicate soul?”

I can’t remember exactly when I became a posturing and delicate soul, as I think it was quite a gradual process but I can remember incredibly clearly all the jobs I wanted to have before actually having a job was a possibility. As a child I was very clear cut about my (at that point, distant) future (it would be a concerning joyless child who wasn’t, really, “What do you want to be when you grow up Timmy?” “Oh...pfftt....something in an office?”)From the ages of four to eight professional acrobatics was my sole aim. My parents had already prepped me for the role by naming me Anna.

Anna the Acrobat!

Alliteration, I had observed, was the key to the profession. As long as the name caught on my lack of coordination and general dudities would be overlooked. 

I could just see it.... 

Anna The Acrobat - wrought in bright colours on posters peeling from dry-cleaners windows. Anna The Acrobat - for one night only! Watch her walk the high wire using only her own massive head as a ballast! Marvel at her feats of daring-do and pause only briefly to allow her some quiet time with her inhaler between acts!

I have no idea where all this came from, as far as I can remember I never saw any particularly inspiring acrobatic displays as a child, I don’t even remember going to a circus. The notion just arrived fully formed in my soft child-head one day “acrobatics - that’s the thing for me”. My parents, ever supportive, installed a trapeze, hand-crafted by my father above my bed, and I practised each night with the sort of fervent self-disapline that has been entirely missing from my life ever since. If only I hadn’t expended it all on that damn trapeze, maybe I would actually have a real job by now.

Anyway, in spite of this initially fervour at age eight acrobatics was left in the dust as I slowly progressed through the dictionary of professions to acting. I was to play Belle in my infant schools production of Beauty and the Beast, opposite James, a flamboyant boy that teachers had decorated so that he resembled a gigantic horned slug. My beast.

Because the role was far too sustained for any one eight year old to tackle singlehandedly they split it between three of us. Other, less talented girls played Belle in the first and third act when she was either flacidly underdeveloped and innocent, or flaccidly developed and rightous, I on the other hand played her in the second, when, captured by slug-James, she went from pure provincal virgin, to Stockholm Syndrome sufferer, to committed lover. To my mind it ranked highly in the list of most complex roles in the western dramatic cannon.

I don’t want to sound boastful but it was staggeringly well received. People threw roses and the such like, asked for my signature, copied my hair cut. I was a hit. The amusingly named Mrs Badger took my parents to one side and suggested that they take me out of main stream education and enrole me in drama school. I knew they would because they had been so supportive with the acrobatics dream and it would be inconsistent of them not to be behind me in this - my true calling. 

When they didn’t take their youngest daughter out of school at the age of eight and sentence her to a life of child-acting with all its attendant mental trauma, I started a long campaign of hate against them, pointedly sulking and not speaking to them for days in a way that I hoped would highlight my natural propensity for drama. Looking back I’m really not sure they noticed. Desolate and seeking comfort I turned to television (I still do this, by the way) and spent long evenings watching the Real Actors. Hating them. With that hard knotted hate that only children are really capable of. Fortunately after a while this subsided, but I kept on with the television watching and, in time, repeated exposure to Rolf Harris, who would leer grotesquely over dead or dying animals every evening at 6.30, suggested a new career path.

Along with every other nine year old in the county I spent the next three years discovering to my horror that you didn’t just become a vet. You couldn’t stride into your local practice and begin magically healing animals like St Francis of Assissi until someone decided to pay you for your trouble. Instead the preparation for the role involved really quite offensive amounts of science and by age twelve, realising that even small amounts of science offended me, I called it a day on vetinary surgery. From then on I floated about, fixing on various professions for short periods of time until year nine, when, as we know, all professions (bah one) were entirely ruled out.

Usually I like to tie up these blog entries in some way, but I still don't have a job, so I can't. I want to say that one computer run simulation doesn't genuinely dictate what jobs you can do, I think that is probably true, but I have no proof of it. I haven't been an acrobat, or an actor, or a vet, or a glass eye maker (that was on the cards for a bit) or a satirist even. I've been an Avon Lady for two hours but they fired me before it began. So far in life all the evidence points to the computer aptitude test being right on the money. I am terminally unemployable.

So I'm going to conclude, desolately, with an image.

Heres to the future...

(You were imaging real milk, weren't you!)

She actually looks quite expert, I wouldn't be that good, that snake would have become tangled in my hair by now, or I would have broken the glass or the snake by holding them too tightly.

Seriously though, if anyone needs a satirist, do let me know.

Dud-child, or Have You Ever Wanted to Know Everything About My Medical History? Good! Settle In!

The pictures of me, post-birth, are some of the most disturbing I have seen. Scrunched and writhing with my severely herniated belly-button, ten nail-less finger and toes, and tiny tube-bisected face I seem to be crying “For the love of God, why am I here? Put me back in! I’m not done yet!”

Three months short of done, or if you prefer 2/3rds finished, I was immediately whisked away to complete my development into something more closely resembling a human child in the glassy womb of an incubator. There I lay, happily focusing on developing working lungs, while the doctors wandered in and out to my mother and said such reassuring things as 

“There seems to be some considerable bleeding in the brain,”

and 

“We aren’t sure if her eyes will work yet.” 

I don’t know whether it dawned on my mother at this point that what she had bought into the world was a bone fide Dud Child or whether it took longer, but Dud Child I was at my first ausipicous coming and Dud Child I was to remain throughout my infancy.

Recently when I was searching through my “child file” (less sinister than it sounds) attempting to find my driving license, I rediscovered the many and myriad letters and certificates pertaining to my dudities and sat laughing at them for about an hour. Most of them are medical reports and some of them are almost fantastically vague. One, full of dense figures and unfathomable text, has written in pen at the bottom “If Anna is worried at all as she matures she can return for correction”

Concerned by the ominous sounding “correction” but incredibly excited that I may have found some sort of medical root for my chronic and generalised worrying, I presented the letter to my mother. She explained that she had been given it on my behalf when clumsyness on her part had resulted in some minor facial surgery on my part. The “worried” referred specifically to any insecurities I might grow to have about the resultant scarring.

This was disappointing. Unlike nuclear war, my encroaching death or the prospect of a loveless suburban life, my scar has never worried me. Feeling as if I’d had the prospect of a “corrected”, worry-free existence snatched away from me I returned to the “child file.”

Those papers that weren't misleadingly vague had written at the top a sort of topic sentence for what followed. They were all bundled together in a section of the file that my mother had titled “Medical” but that I would have titled “Will she lead a normal life? NO she’ll be a Dud-child!” Each topic sentence, hilariously and slightly unprofessionally, read like a verbatim recording of what my mother said to person behind the desk, upon checking in with me. They were, more or less, as follows...

“Anna can’t hear anything” 

“Anna can’t speak recognisable english”

“Anna can speak now but she makes up words and expects us to get it” 

- beside which someone of a more professional bent has written “neologisms”

“Anna is weezy and rattley.” 

“The ventalin you gave Anna to reduce her weezy rattlings gave her terrible hallucinatory visions.” - These “visions” are increasingly becoming my formal reason for not taking anything at university “Bah! Only just exploring the corners of your consciousness now? Think you’re Ken Kesey do you? Think you are Allen Ginsburg? Do you? Tit-master? I was expanding my mind aged five! Suck on that.” - I’m a dreadful arse at university, you can tell.

“Anna day dreams so much that I can give her a soft thwack to the ear and she doesn’t notice” 

“Anna has contracted the sort of antiquated diseases that you thought went out with opium”

“Anna is bafflingly clumsy,” - This irks me. For starters the whole concept of clumsiness under the age of five is redundant, show me a graceful toddler and I will show you a swan you have mistaken for a human infant. The idea that I could have been clumsier than your average child without being some sort of one-women-three-stooges-act is offensive. Secondly the hospital would have had, next to the notes on my clumsiness, the notes (however vague) from when my mother, during one of her abortive attempts at tackling the twin goliaths of “walking” and “carrying her child” tripped up her own familiar front steps and accidently broke my face, but at no point did anyone think to chalk my clumsiness up to overwhelming genetics.

and finally...

“Anna has a really big head, is there anything you can do about that?” - I wish this one was a joke but it’s genuine, in the summarial section below the nurse has written “we have measured Anna’s head and can report that she is in the top 90th percentile of head size” you can see her fighting the urge to jot “commiserations” at the end.

The brilliant thing about all of these forms is that at no point are any of the issues solved, there is never a perscription pad attached (apart from with my LSD laced ventalin) but there are always some kind words explaining to my mother “sorry, there is little we can do, you daughter is just a bit...faulty,”

My mother, I think, was consistantly worried that my clumsiness, lack of attention span, and difficulties with hearing, speaking...being, might lump together to form a genuine disorder or be the lasting and dehabilitating effects of that bleeding brain thing. Years of testing proved that this wasn’t the case at all. In a way it would have been nicer if they were. Instead I was just an deeply ineffective child.

To further compound this the “child file” also contains five developmental reports (the results of said testing), these are lengthy and while they have a few saving graces re. academic performance they can essentially be parred down to “Oh dear, Mrs S we are the professionals and...dud-child I’m afraid.”

The first four, at least, the last report in my considerable record is from Dr Prendergast.

Dr Prendergast’s name in and of itself endears me to him greatly.

My mother took me to him in one final brave rush at reclassifying my dudities into one big treatable block.  He took me for an interview and testing session aged 8 and half and his summary of the occasion constitutes a dramatic break from all that comes before it. Rather than being a catalgoue of my many and myriad failings it is basically an advert for me. I am “attentive” “intellegent” “bright eyed and cooperative” I “even show signs of humour” (I glowed when I first read that but I am now beginning to get sore about that “even.”) He concludes with the sentence “I can effectively describe her as a normal little girl.” 

Ah, sweet Dr Prendergast, I wonder if he knew that he was formally elevating me from the dud child I was, stumbling around with my giant head balanced on my weak and ventalin-ravaged body, to the normal and even, possibly, even though she’s female, even, humour-based individual I now am.

The doctors records end there, not just the vauge behaviourial ones but also the proper illness based ones, I think I have been to the doctors twice in the last 13 years, which implies that Prendergasts judgements had a concrete effect upon my constitution or, much more likely, upon my mother. As far as she was concerned the final word had been said, I was normal. I had outgrown the Dud-child phase. She had a piece of paper to prove it. I like to think of her taking it out and looking at it during my intensely weird adolescence, and in fact, now, and thinking “No, I shouldn’t be worried, she is a perfectly normal little girl.”

I realise it would be more poetic if the completely farcical failure of my first few years on this earth had had some sort of lasting effect on me. If when I walked out of my ballsed-up Cambridge interview the walls had whispered “Duuuuuud chiiiiild.” If everytime I failed to impress my bright eyed and cooperative charms upon a pretty man he just lent over and said “I shalln’t be sleeping with you, you are a dud-child.” But it hasn’t. I didn’t even have call to think about it. Till I looked through the child-file to find my driving license, for my third driving test, which I failed, because I am clumsy and can’t focus on more than one thing at a time let alone everything that is going on, on a road, all the time, and because I’m basically deaf and I don’t know left from right, and every so often I get these dreadful ventalin flashbacks.

Seriously though I’m fine now.