Social Anxiety, Depression, and Post-Graduation Life with Social Media [Vent]

I have completely kept off of social media completely, but I’ve stayed off Facebook for a while now since graduating college. I’ve just felt that I had nothing to give or share with the rest of the world, I would go to Facebook everyday and read about everyone else’s lives of success and happiness, of advancements and opportunities achieved, of the marriage proposals and finding salaried jobs and publishing books and first leasing a house, and I really am happy for everyone’s success, I really am.

I just feel I will never be in my fellow graduates’ shoes, I’ve never envisioned myself successful, I’ve never seen myself with a career where I don’t have to worry about how to live from month to month, owning a house, getting married, like what does retirement or benefits even mean anyways? I would just fall into my usual depression, understanding that that wouldn’t be my future, maybe college had set me way more far off from that future than I ever thought I would.

I feel like I failed at life and there’s nothing I can do about it, I ran myself into a dead end. I know people will tell me, you’re just 23 years ago, you haven’t failed, or that I can eventually pay off these loans over time (almost the price of a 2014 Corvette), and I know people change because I know I’m drastically different from what I was at 14 than I am now, but I just feel like if I haven’t figured who I am or who I want to be by now when I’m a fully grown adult, then I most likely never will. There’s nothing I’m particularly good at, I have no passion or interest in anything, especially my degree, so there is no “career choice” for me. I can’t deal with people or social situations for longer than a minute..

So fast forward about 4 months after graduation. Still at home, wake up feeling useless and like I’m just taking up space in this world sometimes. I justify my life in that I help my parents since my dad’s in a wheelchair and I’m just tech support for them whenever they have a problem with the internet or need to understand how to do something with their phones, and lifting heavy things and reaching high things, but I know it’s not enough, nowhere near enough for all they’ve done for me and I just feel terrible overall in the fact that my dad has no complaints at all with my living here and my mom almost tries to keep me here as much as possible, but she has always been overprotective of me. I rarely leave the house except to help parents with shopping, helping my dad in and out the car, and such, or the rare going-out with my two best friends. I do make a very small amount of money through Amazon mTurk, doing some surveys and little basic tasks for money, it adds up sometimes, but I just kind of save it, made about 120 dollars since I’ve been home, but I get very tired and frustrated doing it in a very short amount of time, an hour at most per day. I just use TV shows and movies and video games to escape life and feel like I’m apart of the world, so I don’t have to experience it myself, I’m just not as witty or sociable to make myself my own main character in my life as a story. I’ve had a good friend of mine back in college message me on Facebook in October to ask if I had luck with jobs yet, I felt so embarrassed to say even a fraction of all of what I’ve just wrote. So I just ignored it, and about everyday since, I want to answer but I feel like it’s too late but my life is not acceptable at all to anyone normal. I couldn’t even work the nerve to message my fraternity brothers, even though it’s implied we could tell each other anything with no judgment but once again, on Facebook, my life is nothing in comparison to their success, and I feel like my life is nowhere near the course of what someone in my fraternity should be, so I told myself I will reach out to my pledge father once I, at the very least, get a job and learn how to drive to get a car.

I have finally worked up the nerve to fill out applications online to entry level jobs that has very little social interaction, hopefully 3rd shift since I have a sleeping problem I can’t sleep until like 10AM and wake up around 4 PM. Unfortunately, almost every job had a significant amount of having to socialize and communicate with a lot of people on a daily basis (fast food, customer service rep, front desk assistant/secretary), need some from a year to 5 years of experience of work or location is way too far for someone with no car, relying on public transportation. I filled out some, there was a couple office assistant ones just working with Word and Excel, but when applications took near a hour and a half, then trying to come up with a cover letter, being unable to come up with anything longer than 3 sentences, I knew that cover letters are something I really can’t write with nothing to talk about with myself.

I had my first job interview about a week ago. It was nerve-racking but I started to feel relaxed and actually confident after I spoke to the HR manager, but I came in applying for one job but was told that was filled and asked if I wanted to apply for another (surveillance/security) and I agreed since I couldn’t say no, I felt like I would be rude if I did. So after that interview, I had to interview with the managers of that position, but little did I know, I was competing with five other people, 4 of them seemed like there were in their 40-50s and retired, and 3 of 5 had military experience as one guy was talking to the others while we were in the waiting room. The managers during the interview asked me why they should hire me, I honestly wanted to say I have no idea now, but came up with some mess about being “young and fresh”. I knew there was no way possible I was going to get this job and that was confirmed for me about 2 days ago.. This shook me greatly, because I hadn’t realized that people that had experience are going for jobs that don’t require experience, and I realized that as a 23 year old with no job experience and a degree I don’t even want to work in and having to explain that, I am at a serious disadvantage. And right now, I am just trying to get my pride back up work towards filling out applications again (that have purpose)

There’s not a particular point to this blog post but just to put how I felt out there. I know it’s a very slim chance for anyone to read this, but I figured it would be someone out there to understand what this is like, but I didn’t want to make a big deal, as I just don’t feel like people need to know or that it would matter to anyone with their lives, but I feel a bit lighter in that I got it out of my head and out somewhere, because it was hard to get through.