Current Events > September 30th, 2019 gives me bitter vibes when I think about it.

(+) Yeah! (+)

This is a BlogFAQs post, be warned. Going to be super long, full of unnecessary added-detail, and mainly just out there for me to speak about this to someone other than me. I've just been thinking about that day a lot more lately.

I had an overall great weekend, it felt strangely good, including September 30th itself. It was almost like I was teleported to an alternate universe because the world felt perfect at that moment. People were randomly talking to me, my professors brought my self-esteem up, my crush complimented me, and I was coming off the high of getting many interviews for an internship. The fact it felt so good made me even question it because everything was going too smoothly. I even made a comment on it on the CE discord that's still up, just as proof that it was something I said out loud about how it wasn't right that everything was right.

It's bitter because it felt like some ironic humor played by some mischievous god who knew exactly what was about to happen. Like, I can't even enjoy memories of those days because I feel like an idiot for thinking they ever meant anything. On October 1st, I received my first rejection for an internship, the first of what would probably be more than anyone applying for one, mainly because I applied for more than anyone. Well, technically it wasn't the first, but it was the first rejection after receiving an interview (the other rejections were just failures at the resume/application-level). That hurt because you know at that point, you can't blame the paper being why you didn't get the position. They actually took the time to sit down, get to know me, and decided that after that fact, I, as a person, wasn't good enough.

The first rejection just made me say "Well, I'll show them. If they don't want to bring me in for their 2nd round, it's my job to make them regret that!" but then I received a 2nd rejection... and then a 3rd, and a 4th... and so on. It got to the point where I didn't even want to interview anymore because I felt like such a lousy failure of a human being, and I knew every interview would end up the same. Don't get me wrong, some interviews I can say were lackluster on my part, at least two that I can think of. The others I felt like I did the best I could do, which meant my best wasn't good enough. While it would have been dreamy to have been considered a star-prospect at these firms, and the end result would be me deciding which one to pick out of the many offers, that was not going to happen. At that point, I just wanted one offer from anyone, considering that I knew so many who just applied to one and got it. I just wanted to be able to prove to one company that I could be the great worker I knew I could be. In the end, it was not to be, I ended up with zero offers and a very humiliated, extremely deflated self-worth.

I'd like to point out that I feel like this was a point of recovery for me before all of this. Something happened a year and half ago before these rejections that made me think I was worthless, and I was finally crawling out of the hole and thinking I could turn my life around. Before the rejections, I saw hope for the first time in a long time, so to be sent back down to the bottom of the pit just made me want to give up right then and there. It's not all bad, though. A year later, I interviewed for an actual position, and even interviewed with the same person who interviewed me a year before for one of the companies. I thought I was going to go through the same cycle of rejections, but a day later, he called me up and told me I got the job. Now, another year later, and here we are, 5 days from me starting that job finally after graduating with my master's. Still, there's this part of me that feels like I don't belong because of all those rejections. In my mind, if everyone thought I wasn't valuable enough for an internship before, why am I suddenly the guy they want to actually be doing the real-work day-in and day-out? I'm hoping these thoughts can leave me soon; hopefully, once I start this job, I prove to myself that I am worth something.

September 30th is bitter for me, because when I look back on it, I was so happy that day, but was actually just a fool all along. How little I knew how much it was going to crash down very soon after. It makes me nervous to be happy because what if it happens again? A weekend of happiness gave me two+ years of self-doubt and downright depression.

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tldr

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