i was looking for a job and then i found a job and heaven knows i'm miserable now

i spent years wanting a job. not because i was desperate to work, but because i thought it represented something larger. i wanted somewhere to belong. somewhere that expected me every morning. somewhere that made me feel like i was finally participating in the world instead of watching it happen to everyone else. for the longest time, adulthood looked simple from a distance. you got a job, rented a place, bought yourself little things with your own money and somehow everything else was supposed to fall into place. i thought work would become another part of my life. i never imagined it would slowly become the place where most of my happened.

people keep asking me what time i’m leaving the office and i never really know what to tell them. every evening begins with “just another twenty minutes,” and somehow those twenty minutes keep multiplying. i moved out of my hostel recently but it honestly feels i just changed addresses from one building to another. i sleep at home. i live at work. it’s sentence i used to hear adults say all the time and i always assumed they were exaggerating. i don’t think they were.

the strange thing is that i don’t dislike my job. sometimes i genuinely enjoy it. i like learning things i didn’t know yesterday. i like feeling useful. i like sitting in a room with people who know far more than i do because it reminds me that i still have somewhere to grow. if i hated my job, all of this would make more sense. i’d have someone to blame. instead, the discomfort comes from somewhere harder to point at. it comes from realising that even work you enjoy has a way of quietly asking for almost everything else.

i don’t think anybody prepares you for what happens to your relationship with time. in college, a day felt like something i owned. i coud waste an afternnon watching a film without feeling guilty about it. i could spend three hours sitting with friends doing absolutely nothing and somehow feels like the day had been well spent. now every hour already belongs to something before i’ve even live it. by the time i get home, i’m not asking myself what i want to do tonight. i’m asking what i still have enough energy left to do.

everybody tells you that you’ll be tired. nobody tells you that your hobbies don’t disappear because you stop loving them. they disappear because attention becomes expensive. i haven’t watched a film in weeks. my favorite show is sitting exactly where i left it because every night i tell myself i’ll watch just one episode after dinner. somehow dinner turns into lying on my bed for ten minutes, ten minutes turns into an alarm and suddenly it’s tomorrow again. the things i love haven’t become less important. they’ve just become harder to reach.

weekends have changed too. they don’t feel like freedom anymore. they feel like recovery. i don’t look forward to saturday because i have exciting plans. i look forward to it because it’s the only day my mind remembers how to move at a slower speed. i see people who have been living like this for ten or twenty years and i genuinely can’t decide whether i should admire them or feel sorry for them. maybe they’ve figured something out that i haven’t. maybe they haven’t and they simply become better at carrying it.

what surprised me most wasn’t the workload. it was the anxiety. i spend an unreasonable amount of time convinced i’m about to get fired. nobody has suggested it. nobody has implied i’m doing badly. objectively, everything is fine. but every email feels slightly ominous. every mistake feels bigger than it is. every conversation with a senior begins with the irrational certainity that i’ve finally been found out. i wake up anxious. i go to sleep anxious. sometimes i leave the office without my laptop, but somehow i still bring the work home.

and then there’s the strange guilt of missing a version of your life you spent years trying to leave. i miss being unemployed. not becasue i miss having nothing to do but because i miss having time that belonged entirely to me. i miss boredom. i miss afternoons with no purpose beyond existing. i miss deciding to watch a movie at two in the afternoon because there was nothing else demanding my attention. i miss not feeling like every hour had to justify itself.

the irony is that this is exactly what i wanted. for years i measure my life by how badly i wanted to get here. getting a job felt like crossing an invisible line into adulthood. i thought i’d finally feel settled once i did. instead i’ve realised that achieving something and feeling at home inside it are two compeltely different thing. sometimes you spend years wanting a life, only to discover that living it feels nothing like imagining it.

people keep telling me i’ll get used to it. i probably will. human being are frighteningly good at adapting. maybe one day i’ll stop checking the time every half hour. maybe one day i’ll stop feeling guilty for spending an evening doing nothing. maybe one day work will become just another part of my life instead of the thing everything else has to fit around.

i hope they’re right.

because i spent years looking for somewhere to belong.

i just didn’t know belonging somewhere could leave so little of me everywhere else.