Life in Capital Letters

Take a deep breath.
Hold it so you don’t hyperventilate. Hold it until your lungs feel like they’ll burst.

Close your eyes and start mentally deleting your dreams of a livable salary and benefits, of ever owning that awesome fixer-upper house on Baronne St., of having a job that won’t destroy your soul, of having a job at all.

Try to delete your imaginings of what everyone will think when they hear that you’ve finally failed at something. Try not to think of the cliched words that can only be uttered from a secure fortress of success, whose ever-so-slightly holier-than-thou tone will glow a sickly shade of green in the darkness that you find yourself in. Realize that you will swallow whatever is given, simply because it’s there.

Above all, try not to imagine your mother’s disappointment, communicated by her impatiently going through the motions of comforting you so she can quickly get to the part where she doles out advice on how not to suck at life. She has experience in the business of failing, she’ll tell you, and just-grow-up! Find any job and work your way up, hurry up now and don’t be picky.

Take stock of your options: take a job working in a restaurant (rewind your life to 6 years ago); take a job as a receptionist (wouldn’t mom be proud to see you following in her secretarial footsteps); become one of those smelly faux-anarchist train-hopping street buskers that outnumber roaches in the French Quarter (reject this idea on the grounds that your dog would not make a good pack animal); go back to school and get another degree that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on (scratch that, consider tech school); withdraw your remaining savings and go live in a yurt in Mongolia.

Force yourself to search - with a zombie-like combination of lethargy and hunger - for a job, any job. Try not to cry again when you realize that the only jobs open to you are ones that don’t require a college degree. Resist the paralysis of depression by semi-correctly pointing out to yourself that this is a generational thing and the-times-is-hard.

Go through the previous stages several more times until you’re ready to go out into the world and get slaughtered again kick some ass.