An Essay on Character

Hanging out with my twin sister in Breckenridge a couple months ago, being unemployed was not a problem. We mountain-biked, went camping, and drank beer with absurdly high alcohol content that I had not seen since my days of cross-border raids into Belgium. Job? What job? My sister’s Breck friends embrace that freedom with the same vigor they tackle ski runs.

Washington, DC, is quite a different story. If DC were a guy he’d constantly be talking about his work and would feel naked without a tie. I’m pretty much waiting for a little airplane to sky-write “UNEMPLOYED!” with a perfectly drawn finger in the heavens pointing down at me. That is what being a jobseeker in DC feels like. Rather than eating humble pie, it’s like free-basing humble heroine. In a few short months I have gone from a bilingual, Masters-holding, respected, work-is-my-life management position overseas to swimming in a sea of overqualified professionals who have two Masters or speak three languages. I’ve thought what a character-building experience this is. That thought was immediately followed by another thought: “Screw that.” Congo hammered a certain amount of character in me that I feel should suffice for at least a year. Is unemployment really going to provide some sort necessary humbling that I didn’t garner while lying in intensive care in a hospital in a third world country with only three IV drips for company (a day before which a friend shot me in the butt with anti-malarial drugs and an Indian colonel held back my hair as I gracelessly vomited at a military base)? Character, that devilish friend, is always on the look out for a new “in.”

Still, I smiled when I woke up with a headache this morning. No panic that it might be malaria. I simply reached for my Advil. Moving back to America was about my need to change my lifestyle, and maybe I forgot that the comforts of my home country would be combined with the uncertainty of leaving my job. DC’s fixation on work highlights this uncertainty, and the greener grass is never as green once you get to it. So perhaps I should stop trying to figure out how green it is and start doing cartwheels on the lawn. How’s that for character?