What's A Girl To Do?

It has been a good long while since I last logged in and unloaded, well today I have the time. I went to bed last night frustrated, sad, angry, and resentful. I recently obtained a certificate as an Information Security Systems Professional, it's a field that I feel as if I could excel in if given the chance. With COVID being rampant, a lot of industries do not have the need to hire a noob when they have competent and readily available people. So with the job market taking a hit and working a part-time job that makes me want to pull out my hair, I'm feeling beyond frustrated. How does one make a much-needed career shift when no one wants to give you the opportunity? My frustrations with job-hunting were way before COVID, I'd been applying, and following-up with opportunities only to be ghosted by HR & recruiters. Why even put the job out there? Well as I've read on several posts on LinkedIn, employers like to create a candidate pool and dwindle it down, with determining factors of who can we get to do the most work with the least amount of pay - sorry I'll never fit that bill; I've been there and done that already and I know my worth. So, I choose the path to increase my knowledge - start taking classes earning certificates that would hedge out some of my competition. Well, this backfires in my face, why because again I know my worth and what I'm not willing to accept. I was told by an associate, "Well maybe you need to dumb-down your resume," and let me tell you all it took was a look to make her back away from that sentence. If dumbing down our smarts and integrity is what it takes to get a job, then that's not the job for me. Other things that were making me have a night of turmoil are menopause and weight gain. I've struggled all my life with my weight, up until last year when I was on a great medication that allowed me to get off 75 lbs. in a year. I was happy that it was coming off and I could breathe easier literally and figuratively, I went down from plus size clothes to being able to shop wherever I wanted with ease and a smile on my face. Now with menopause and stress, the weight is inching back up. I'm eating healthy and exercising only to be met with numbers on the scale higher than they were 2 weeks prior. It's a shame that all insurance companies are not on the same page, the only reason I'm not on the aforementioned medication is because of a switch with insurance companies and the new insurance not allowing me to be on weight medication. Why take someone off of a medication that actually works and does exactly what it says it's going to do? But on the other hand, I can always have lap-band surgery with its high-risks...I'm that .000001 outlier person that weird shit happens to when you think you know how things are going to go, I get that random side-effect that happens to a minute amount of people. The last thing that kept me up last night, I'm a wannabe author that has had a case of writer's block for the last 18 months when it comes to my protagonist's development as a villain. Ever dream of what you need to put down on paper only to wake up and those words have not only seemed to disappear from my thoughts but the little you can recall sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher. In this time you have to have your hands dabbling in some of everything in order to feed your creative juices and intellect, I guess for me being a half-way stay-at-home parent to grown kids I have too much mental energy to expend and not enough ways to let it out.