I've lost count of the number of times I told myself "Whew! I'm definitely done with teaching English!" or "Now that I have this job, no more tutoring for me!"
And then I look at the balance in my checking account. And I hear through the Franco-American grapevine about some tutoring. And I think "Well, this family is offering 30€ an hour, it'd be a shame to pass up the opportunity to make some cash."
And I find myself on a Sunday night digging through all my old "Teaching English" files trying to get my materials together for my first tutoring session on Monday.
Thoughts bubble up: anger, resentment, disappointment, despair, resignation, frustration, fatigue
I have a Masters degree and an interesting job at the university, but I only make about 30€ more per month than the interns at Airbus.
I feel stuck between my desire to do fun things (travel, eat in restaurants, give gifts...) and my dislike of the tutoring I'm required to take on in order to pay for it.
I know it's all for a good cause: a trip to Ireland I've planned in April to do genealogical research.
But when will I not be barely making it?
"When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him.
In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one."
Karl A. Menninger
4 comments:
Sometimes I hate to admit it, but the lack of money was the biggest reason why I left France. I just got so sick of being poor and knowing that I could make better money elsewhere. :(
Does it help at least a little to see the tutoring as a necessity to reach a goal with a definite end date? Part of what makes my cashier job bearable is knowing it will end, it's not forever.
I'm in that same "when will this end?" state, and recently I've been reading this blog, http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/
and just mentally it's reassuring to know that even people who make way more than me still have money issues. And credit card debt and student loans . . . Explaining to Ben our budget to save for our USA trip would mean no dining out this month, he got very upset, saying what's the point of him working in Luxembourg if it's to eat ramen noodles all the time? So each time he decides not to get a kebab on the way home from work, I remind him that's one more pizza in NYC we can eat. And when he freaks out about how low his account is, I remind him how much we've saved for the trip and for the wedding, besides, what did he need to buy anyway? More dvds we'll only watch once? A video game he'll get tired of in a week?
I feel like you already have this attitude, knowing what you need versus want, you bike and have the garden, but again, just reading the stories of others on the blog made me realize we're really ok here. ("Hooked fish" stories, to go with your quote?) Just one of us with student loan, no credit card debt, low health care costs . . . We just set up a new savings account for things besides the wedding, and all my "extra" money from various little jobs goes into it. Daily it's a hard thing to live with, really hard sometimes (especially at my job seeing people spend so much on clothes!) but just knowing we'll be able to do so much later helps. Your definition of "making it" is probably very different than mine, but either way it takes time, many many months, and I think that's what's hardest, finding the balance between a difficult present and a hopeful future.
My job is below my intellectual level too but it's the price I pay to live where I do.
I'm thankful I don't have to teach any more though. I understand your pain.
I too have recently been wrestling with doubts and questions of will I ever have a successful career here in my field, and is it worth the struggle? Not to mention the resounding "when will I not be barely making it."
I think there are many things to take into consideration about these jobs ruts...
a) Comparing yourself to engineers is not productive. It's a completely different industry and one that is still fairly well infused with money. I know I will most likely never be on the same pay scale as Edd, who is an engineer. Stop comparing yourself to people in fields you are not in.
b) We discussed in a class about the economics of our generation and those a bit younger than us. Economists are calling us the "lost generation" as we are graduating with bachelor's degrees and higher, but having a very difficult time finding openings in our fields of study. Either because the people who should be retiring from those posts are holding out a bit longer, because companies/orgs are not expanding and thus not creating new posts, or worse, because these posts are being cut.
c) This is happening to a generation of people (ie those aged 18-34) who were told throughout their scolarity by most everyone around them to go for their dreams and to make their passion their work. Lots of quippy things like that. We're a generation that feels entitled to having a job that we actually like. Something that even as late as our parents' generation was a bit much to ask for. Maybe we have idealized our imagined professional lives a bit too much.
I realized something a couple years ago. I spent a lot of my highschool and college years with some general expectations of what my adult life would vaguely ressemble. And being an adult is full of moments where I realize, OK - life is not like going to fold out like that. For me it's become a journey of readjusting my expectations in function to what is going on around me and keeping as positive of an attitude as I can about it.
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