Knocking on dream job’s door

So here I am, on a third day of a new year, digesting another failure and trying to forget a personalised astrological promise that I would have found a job back in November.
I still remember those times when I loved movies like “Devil Wears Prada” and wholeheartedly believed you can get a dream job offer if you are simply smart and creative. You stumble into the main office looking deranged, face-to-face with an editor-in-chief themselves and give a passionate speech about why exactly you should be given a chance. The editor then would squint their eyes and take a long pause, surely because they’ve seen something in you, but the story can’t reveal it just yet. So you would get a job thanks to that charged speech, I thought. Not the self-absorbed show-off scrolling the TikTok in the waiting room. You, the shy and the quiet, who wrote your first poem at 10, your first novel at 14 and won a literary contest during high school (which you cannot prove because your city is engulfed in a war for the past 9 years and all records are lost).
I used to be a dreamer and I used to be adorably naive. Now I understand that in real life, those awkward movie characters would not even get to the interview stage. Not enough pomposity, not enough social media followers, not enough embellishment skills. And it becomes a real bummer when you can’t fake superficiality and are unable to show off. You can find silliest spelling mistakes in big glossy magazines, but you will not be listened to. You know deep down you never forced your art. It comes naturally to you. You cannot flaunt a myriad of posh project contracts, but you just so happened to be that person who takes a walk or rides a train and stumbles on a phrase in your thoughts. And that phrase becomes the stick for a cotton candy cloud of a new story or a haiku. You cannot prove it with a bureaucratic seal of approval from the minister of writing or whatever counts as cool in the marketised to death art industry. But you know full well you have it.
And it is best you realise that the world is much more complex and much more unfair than what your support group is telling you from the day you first glimmered with your talent.
But what have you got to do? I am still figuring it out myself. And don’t get me wrong I have rolled up my sleeves for dishwashing, sandwich “artistry”, 9-hours- on-your-feet retail, late night bar, and a hotel reception where I got fired 2 weeks after I started because I told someone in an informal conversation that reception clerk is not my career dream. Having two degrees does not help either, and I am only speaking for myself and my thorny way to land a writing job with degrees in Journalism and Scriptwriting, and at their core these professions are not as in demand as doctor or lawyer.
In my years of writing job search I have completed test tasks and been told I did great only to then become unsuccessful in my application due to “lack of self-advertising skills”. I have been told I don’t have enough recent experience, and I truly did not know how to answer this. Because yes, I cannot land a job for a long time, and the longer the gap, the harder it gets.

But I will keep trying. Because no matter if you are paid for it, art will continue coming to life for the sake of the art, never the profit, titles or approval. And if you happen to be one of the lucky people who gets paid and recognised for your art - then you would have cracked the concrete injustice of a modern world. That is to be happy at work. And if that never happens, at least you already know name of the author of your future child’s bedtime stories.