Education and Work
Monday, October 13th, 2008One of the hardest things that has been going on since we moved here to New Zealand is my job search.
Clearly I miss my friends and family and the sights and smells of my neighborhood as well as the tastes (if my Father doesn’t meet us at the airport with a bag of real bagels and a litre each of Tropicana OJ I might disown him), but what I’ve discovered is that work, at least meaningful work, helps frame who you are and provides a link to the culture and society around you.
Currently I’m doing some freelance stuff from home (work from back in Montreal), it’s money and it’s cool and all, but it doesn’t make me feel part of anything. Mostly it makes me feel even more separate.
I’ve never been one to be a workaholic, I’ve often thought that I’m the very best version of myself after about 3 days of hard hiking and camping in the woods. But work, and especially colleagues, provide you with a built in social network and a connection to the events and culture around you. Working as part of a small team like I did at Concordia also gave you a sounding board and way to parse meaning out of the random stuff that was going on there. Given our team size and the closeness with which we all worked (overlapping responsibilities, shared interests, brainstorming solutions, shared lunches, birthday celebrations etc) it often felt like a parallel family (albeit one as dysfunctional as the one I was born to).
Here in Dunedin I lack this feeling of belonging and of purpose and it’s a very bizarre realization that work has helped define who I am.
So as I search for work, I’m confronted with two conflicting needs: money now (which has near and long term implications) and finding something that has meaning and value for me. What I’m starting to realize is that as much as I want an education related job I’m going to have to balance this need with the economic reality of living in a smaller market than I’m used to.
It’s all quite unsettling.