To Seek Morsels of Comfort Amid Adult Anxiety and Stress

I’m educated, highly intelligent, oft-well-motivated and talented, but underemployed in a dead-end job. I seek and my steady work history evinces that I deserve a better job. In what business headlines call a frozen market, job networking isn’t helping my search for a better job.

Amid anxiety, it’s vital to find and note some lightness in life. For example, every day in the United States there is a holiday or observance. Most of them are petty even laughable! When facing life seriousness, laughter is a balm!

As an artistic habit, I want to write 500 words every week, which might resonate culturally. Sometimes the essay uses an observance as fodder and date peg. For example, National Peanut Butter Cookie Day is on June 12. Or Wear Blue Day is on June 13. So is National Movie Night. As I consider what to write about for a given week, I mean for the essay to jibe with a Thursday or Friday date. (It’s a way to pin down my imagination.)

We oughtn’t take life as seriously as usual when calendars of observances and holidays are littered with silliness. To find a morsel of comfort in the fact that National Peanut Butter Cookie Day, on June 12, or Wear Blue Day and National Movie Night are on June 13 can lift the psyche.

To take a pause from the grave seriousness of adult life is a form of self-care. How do I find comfort away from adult stressors? Do I seek balm by noting silly holidays or by taking cues from a notion of practical optimism?

Yale’s Happiness Lab podcast ran an episode about lessons from Practical Optimism:

In the face of nagging anxiety and pessimism, lessons from “Practical Optimism,” which is a book by Sue Varma, Ph.D., can be a tool of lightness. The author offers a mnemonic for neutering a negative; Name it, Claim it, Tame it, and Reframe it. That it is a negative situation. Name the negative. Claim it. Tame the negative. Then reframe that bogeyman.

What poison of the negativity will I tame? How will I find a morsel of comfort or lightness as a way to reframe the negativity? A tight jobs market, and job networking which is falling short are bogeymen.

I know that even with anxiety, I’m putting my best effort to replace an unengaging part-time job with too few hours to live comfortably. When networking is a key, I applaud birthdays, work anniversaries and more of friends and peers who could help me into a new and interesting replacement job.

So I‘m trying to tame the poison of the situation with pillars of practical optimism. Not minimizing the burden of generalized anxiety, I recognize the difficult obstacle of a tight job market. This, especially for educated Black American job-seekers.