The Witching Hour

Previously on Dan 2.0: After months of hunting and hurting, I finally found a job. I decided this was only the beginning on the quest to improve myself.

It is quite late at night when I am typing this out and that is never a good idea. Things always seem much worse late at night than they do in the daylight. Or at least less bearable. I felt it was time for another ‘life update’ post, the first post-job-search-post and despite the late hour, here it comes.

I had the unenviable task of filling out all the paperwork for my new job at the weekend. Because I will be employed by a local authority this requires a lot of work. Mine was perhaps more difficult than most. Firstly, they wanted my Doctor’s details and I then realised I was still registered to a Doctor’s at my university town. This meant I had to go into my local Doctors to re-register. I naively thought this would be an easy task. After all, they had been my local surgery for all but my time at university, 18 years of my life. The family have been there for ages- it has been my Mum’s surgery for over 40 years. Despite this I was still required to prove who I was and fill out two long forms.

‘OK’, I thought, ‘it will be easy from here.’ I zoomed through most of the paperwork, filling out my personal details time and time again. I was reaching the end when I had to fill out a disclosure form, essentially a criminal record check. This requires you to put down every address you’ve lived in the last five years. I was at uni for four of these and lived in three different houses there as well as my family house the rest of the time. This meant four addresses to put on the form but there was only space for three. There was some tiny writing which informed me I needed to go online and download an ‘extra space’ form. I followed the link to find the general page for the disclosure service, with no obvious link to the form. It took me twenty minutes of clicking and scrolling to find the form. You can imagine my frustration at this point when the printer refused to work.

After an exasperating afternoon of form filling I was finally finished. I then had to take all the forms to my new workplace to prove who I am again. By this point, I wasn’t quite sure who I was myself.

As regular readers may be aware, my big challenge before I start work on the 3rd September is to pass my driving test. This is turning out to be easier said than done. For one thing there is a ridiculous waiting list at the local test centre and the earliest I can book a test is 29th September. Unless I get lucky and someone cancels it looks like I will be forced to use public transport for the first few months of my job at the very least.

Even if I manage to book a test before I start work I fear the chances of passing it are slim. I’ve been learning for longer than most people do yet I am still pretty awful. I suppose I could just about survive on the roads without causing accidents but the test requires a little more than just about surviving. I can’t do two of the manoeuvres than involve reversing and I have almighty trouble at being prepared at roundabouts and junctions. My brain really struggles to think about where I need to go and then react quickly enough to actually go there without stopping. As I knew it always would be, driving is a real challenge for me, yet another everyday practical skill which I find excruciatingly hard.

It’s difficult to explain how frustrating the whole not being able to drive thing is. If I lived in a big city with excellent public transport links then it would be fine but I don’t. It takes me an age to get anywhere and usually involves a fair bit of walking. I just feel trapped in my childhood bubble. So many people I know are moving on with their lives, getting married, having children etc whilst I still live with my parents, am single and can’t even drive. I feel so pathetic and like I fail at being an adult.

Another thing which plagues my mind lately is my lack of friends. Whilst I have a couple of close friends, my social life is pretty much non-existent. This is partly my fault as I have a habit of pushing people away but that is rarely intentional. I’m just not the sort of person people become friends with. And of course a lack of social life mean any advancements in my barren love life are also pretty unlikely. I feel that I would be a lot happier in myself and in life if I had more of a social life but I fear it will not change anytime soon.

I fear I have been rather angsty in this post but there is a constant feeling of angst inside me at the moment. I think that now the stress of finding a job is over I have had time to contemplate my situation. Many people would probably take failing to qualify as a teacher in their stride but I just can’t. I’ve never excelled at anything but I’ve never really failed anything before either. It was the pivot between a dream life and a pretty rubbish one and it ended up coming down on the latter. The first three months of the year were so awful and I’m not sure I will ever properly recover from the experience.

So there’s your life update for you. I feel that I’ve said both a lot and no-where near enough in this post. Sometimes I feel like I should justify my feelings but actually I don’t need to. I’m allowed to not be happy. Hopefully I will be a little more cheery in my next post, whatever that may turn out to be.

Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light- Albus Dumbledore