Release the Pressure, Grads: We Will Get The Dream Job Someday

I posted the following thread to my Twitter account a few nights ago.

2020 has been one hell of a year, and it has really been felt for the 18–25 year-old demographic. For the school leavers and new graduates trying to find their feet in an overloaded job market. It has led to many creatives rethinking their entire career paths as the world is no longer a place that is fostering their progression.

The U.K. government hasn’t been the most reassuring by telling people to retrain. Retrain where? And are you aware of how many people you are asking to retrain. What about the ones who have spent years studying their craft to be told it is not possible in the current world and to try and find something new in an already oversaturated job market. It becomes incredibly disheartening, worrying and saddening for young people trying to find their feet in the world, and to start trying to live in a world post-education.

I always sort of knew, but more so in the last year that my career path was not going to be conventional. I should have known more as the life I lead now is not conventional for a young Pakistani woman of Muslim heritage. I live independently and without religion, I campaign against apostasy and blasphemy laws. There is nothing conventional about where I come from, so my ambitions for my career were not either.

Writing is something I have always loved. From the fictional fantasy novel I never finished as a sixteen-year-old to the poetry I write to express my feelings to the legal tech and human rights journalism I have been exploring in the last couple of weeks. I know this is where part of my career journey lies, but in this current climate it is not a solid full-time job. It’s something I have to do alongside a paid part-time employment, and may well be how I live for the rest of my life.

The dream is to write, to write about freedom of expression and human rights because I took great steps to fully express myself as an atheist woman from my background. To tell the stories the world chooses to ignore because this is not a new battle, it is something that has always existed. Which is why my heart lies with campaigning, to talking about apostasy and blasphemy openly making the world more aware. Recently, I have had the opportunity to work with a great company, 2030hub, who focus on sustainable development goals and I am finally being given that guidance and platform.

Again, with the intern writing and this training opportunity it is all unpaid and that can be quite daunting in a world that is focused on landing the big full-time grad jobs. It is the freelancers, the gig workers and the volunteers that have been forgotten about in the current world situation. Had the world been ‘normal’ it would be easier to support in say a full/part-time retail or hospitality job. But, because those are so far and few in between, not to mention the worrying of them being open or closed, working from home or furlough, money worries creep in and make you question whether you should just take the 9–5 so you don’t have to worry about money.

It took a lot of telling myself, hearing from others and having that reassurance that I am good at what I do to have faith in where I am going. To not know the full journey is part of discovering and learning new things. It is going to be hard, but as long as I can afford to keep myself fed and sheltered, I will eventually end up in a place where I am able to do the things I love most for a living.

Most of this pressure that young people are facing right now is the pressure they are putting on themselves to succeed in a world that is making it difficult to. There is so much pressure to have everything together once you graduate, but that is not how life works, and even more so in the world we are in now.

We will get to where we want to be, it is just going to be a longer journey. We are all riding the same storm, our boats may be different, but it is still the same battlefield and we have to be kinder to ourselves. We have to relieve the pressure because we are living in unprecedented circumstances and its okay to not know what we are doing. These are the years we make mistakes, the years that we figure things out because we have plenty of time to get things together.