Job #4: The Producer

Well, I’ve been hired. For the next month anyway. Youth Radio, where I’ve worked on and off since high school, has hired me 3 days a week to help them produce a website for an investigative story they’re working on.

While I have reported an investigative story for them before, when it comes to producing a website, I’m pretty much clueless. Normally, I trust in my ability to learn on the job, especially when it comes to journalism jobs. But last night, after my first day, my body was not so sure.

Thinking about work, I started to get an actual panic attack.  I laid in bed, listening to my head throb in perfect harmony with my chest and wondered: Why so nervous, Rachel?

The investigative piece I reported last year involved going up against the Navy, working into the night, and thinking about issues of physical and sexual abuse daily. It went on for months and was the definition of intense, high-stakes work.  But the only day I cried or felt nervous about that story was the day it aired on npr. Up until that point, I’d kept it together, and knew doubting myself would only slow the story down.  The adrenaline of it all gave me a sense of purpose and confidence.

So why should helping organize a website a year later seem so daunting and stressful by comparison? Why does simply being back in this office make my jaw clench and my normally mostly-stable mind confused? Do I have Post–Traumatic-Investigative-Stress-Disorder? Or is it just that since graduating college, I’ve lost faith in my own intelligence?

Maybe part of what’s been making me so stressed as a Producer is this: it’s actually what people call a ‘real’ job, a job the Economic Policy Institute would deem “worthy of my degree”.  It’s the kind of job I ‘should’ have out of college, the kind of job that demands I have some prior skill and experience.

And although it’s just 3 days a week, it’s still an office job. I actually have to wake up in the morning. Like a good addict, I start to think of coffee as a personal friend, a mug to confide secrets too. And for roughly 8 hours, I sit at a desk. Some hours go by quickly, while others seem to drag on and on. A sense of dread, or of being found out as incompetent looms over me. I find myself actually wishing for the privacy of a cubicle.

And just like that, you have an office job.  A job that’s interesting–important even–but still an office job. The days start to shape themselves around the workday–the few hours in between are devoted to exercising, eating, trying to relax and sleeping.

So here’s the challenge of this next month: to learn how to maintain a sense of self, outside of the job.  Since I can’t write about the investigation or other details at work, I’m going to spend some time exploring the concept of the post-grad’ office job. I want to see if after a month, I’ll have found a way to be happy and competent, even comforted by this routine. I want to know if the only way that’s possible is to embrace the sleepy, unhappy complacency so many post-grads fear.

Since I also won’t be able to look for other work this month, I’ll be expanding posts to include other 20-Something stories of employment and adventure. So consider this your blog water cooler, and feel free to contact me with your 20-Something tales of office woe and misadventure.