When Expectations Don't Meet Reality

Dear Aftergrad, how do I manage my anxiety while juggling a full-time and part-time job?

Dear Aftergrad is an advice column for recent grads and young professionals on work, careers, and adulting — from us and fellow aftergrads. Got a crazy confession about adulting? Looking for advice on navigating postgrad life? Let us offer you our two cents. Submit your stories, questions, or dilemmas via our Dear Aftergrad Submission Form for a chance to have them featured in a future episode or newsletter. You can also DM us on Instagram, write us an email at theaftergradpodcast@gmail.com, or comment on this post.

via Pexels

Dear Aftergrad,

I’m a recent graduate, and I uprooted my entire life to the Bay Area from Los Angeles to begin my career in the corporate world. Despite the immense number of activities and adventures to embark on in the San Francisco area, I have found myself struggling on more than one occasion to pay for social activities and necessities due to the high rent costs.

A month ago, I started working a second job in a restaurant near my apartment. I often jump between both work environments right after the other on most days during the week. Although I feel more burned out as the weeks go by, I have noticed that both work environments have provided me perspective about the grave disparities in SF, and stark differences between the lifestyles of young tech entrepreneurs and prosperous college graduates versus everyday employees in the service industry.

Oftentimes, I find myself serving tables of people I recognize who work in the same building as my corporate job (not the same company). I have only told my close network of friends that I work a second job, but I feel a little ashamed and embarrassed. I would love to be able to promote the fun and carefree lifestyle that I tend to see other recent grads post on their Instagram, but my reality is an entirely different narrative.

I would love to hear any advice that you have surrounding how to juggle a part-time job and combating emotions of anxiousness about sharing the fact that I have a second job with others.

Signed,

Friend of the Show

---

Hey, FotS!

For the record, your experience is one that so many recent grads go through but don’t always care to admit — either to themselves or their friends and family. So your response to the situation is a true sign of maturity.

It isn’t easy making the transition from college to corporate. Nor is it any more straightforward to go from sleeping in a dorm to living on your own in an apartment. And yet, every year, hundreds of thousands of aspiring adults take this step with no honest clue about what they’re doing. Including us, when we finally secured our first apartment in DC. The fact that you managed to make this move from one city to another immediately after graduating while facing an uncertain labor market at the backend of a pandemic is admirable, to say the least.

As you clearly know, the cost of living in San Francisco is astronomical. Therefore, the likelihood of needing a second job to make ends meet is high, especially for recent grads who are living on wages that haven’t been adjusted for inflation. Your current struggle has nothing to do with you personally. It has everything to do with the fact that you are at a particular point in your life and career when you’re forced to make strategic sacrifices. We can’t have it all. At least, not yet anyways. This moment is temporary, and it’s building towards something bigger.

Experiencing burnout from working two jobs is never ideal, but there are reasons to be optimistic about your current reality. And you already mentioned one of them in your letter, which is the firsthand perspective you’re gaining on the grave disparities in lifestyle in a major city like San Francisco. It’s one thing to read about this narrative in the headlines. It’s another to actually see this dynamic play out.

Aside from this, you’re also learning the value of money in terms of how expensive it can be to pay for your basic survival, as bleak as that sounds. This is not to say that you didn’t already know the importance of having a job in order to make money. It’s to emphasize the limitations on what certain amounts of money can and can’t do. Just because you can pay for something doesn’t mean you can reasonably afford it. As teenagers and college students, we sometimes misunderstand how much money is necessarily required to conduct a life. A ruinous misstep we would do well to notice sooner rather than later. But there’s something to be said for having to go above and beyond — to struggle, in some cases — for the bare minimum, despite how unreasonable it may feel in the moment. Although uncomfortable, this challenge will certainly enlarge you.

Feeling ashamed and embarrassed as a result of these circumstances makes complete sense. In fact, who wouldn’t? You were promised one outcome, namely that you would be able to use your college degree to find a white-collar job and jumpstart your life as an independent adult. And now, you’re facing a completely different reality. It’s totally natural to be like, “Um, what’s going on…?!” In these moments, it can be so cathartic to confide in the people closest to us, like our friends and family. And granted, fear of judgment is real. But any person who makes you feel ashamed or embarrassed for working a job is either filthy rich or severely broke — and would surely benefit from an additional job or two. Whatever the case, they are certainly not your friend.

Paying your bills is sexy. Not the actual act of taking the money you worked for and depositing it into someone else’s bank account, but the capacity to do so. Putting food on the table is something to be celebrated, especially when the spread is a step above Top Ramen or TV dinners. It’s the little things that matter, even though these are pretty big achievements for recent grads.

What we see on Instagram is only a small fraction of the story. Therefore, it’s not a healthy framework for us to reference when imagining how we want our daily lives to look because life is filled with peaks and valleys. And if we only share and consume the high moments, then we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Comparison will forever be the thief of joy, so it does absolutely nothing for our mental to think about what we have or don’t have in comparison to someone else.

According to The Guardian, the number of Americans working two or more jobs to make ends meet has risen over the past few decades. So data would suggest that you’re not the only recent grad struggling to make ends meet despite the prevailing narratives that get circulated on social media. When juggling this type of responsibility, it can be helpful to live your life on a self-induced autopilot where anything that needs to be accomplished — everything from meal prepping to sending emails — gets written down or placed on a digital calendar well in advance to prevent you from spending time and energy thinking about what needs to get done rather than taking action.

It’ll be hard at times. And it’s probably hard right now, but you can overcome it because you already did the difficult part by owning your experience of needing to make more money, searching for a second job, submitting the application, and showing up. The next time you feel anxious about sharing how you work two jobs with others remember that you empowered yourself in a moment of crisis. How very adult of you.

Warm wishes,

Your Fellow Aftergrads, Robert and Victoria