So it’s been a week since I was asked to leave Minuteman. I am doing better than I expected and I think it’s because I’m focusing my energy on the present but also I have been getting a lot of support from my friends and family, so I’m really grateful for that. But I have been feeling a sense of abandonment and it’s really not the best feeling in the world.

This past weekend I finished up my Cambridge Science Festival activities and this coming weekend I’ll be spending time down in Eastham to attend the Appearances ’14 activities. The opening for this festival was last Friday when I came down to Wellesley so unfortunately I couldn’t attend. The Appearances festival has a cool Nature Divination and Art + Meditation events that I am thinking of going to.

In terms of goals right now… ideally I want to stay in Longmeadow, MA. Because there I have space for a darkroom and if I move back to Wellesley, I won’t have space for anything and I’ll be back to where I was summer of 2013. Except, I wouldn’t be grieving from heartbreak, so I suppose it’ll be easier to deal with and I won’t be dealing with the same fears and anxiety. But eventually, the long-term goal is to move out to California. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since my trip last September.

One of the major issues at Minuteman was that my boss couldn’t understand or bothered to care enough that I had a mental condition that prevented me from seeing certain things upon completion of a project, which he saw as mistakes. One of the things that he said to me that has rubbed me the wrong way was I couldn’t find a process that works for me, it’s not that easy!

Throughout my life the specialists that I have seen all told me to take time when doing certain things. The issues that occurred at Minuteman were issues that weren’t issues in school… because the design process we were taught it was OK to send multiple revisions to the customer. So we never had ‘mistakes’ because they were always caught in the revision process.

We were also taught in school that reporting to someone to look over your work was OK. Well, that didn’t really vibe well at Minuteman. The project had to be done, and done right before it was seen by our bindery person, my boss or the other designer I worked with because they simply didn’t have time to go over everything. OK I get that. But if you have no quality control in the first place, how do you expect ANYONE to do ANYTHING right the first time around?

Last Summer I was in a slump because I was afraid I’d never find a job in my field and I did find a job. I had all the talent, but in my field talent only goes so far, and my experience didn’t line up exactly with my level of talent. I had the design skill of someone with 3-5 years of experience but the experience level of an entry-level designer.

My new fears are finding a job that is suitable enough for my talent level. I do not want to stay in a position where I’ll only be using my design skills minimally. As I felt over and over again at Minuteman I felt the experience was killing my talent level. It was suffocating my desire to design and be creative and ultimately suffocating me! My mother made a good point when I told my parents over the phone on the last day at my job at Minuteman… she said, Just think of the number of days you came home and had a bad day! Too damn many.