Giving Up or Giving In

I’ve always had trouble with labels. There are so many labels that correctly apply to me in at least one way, but there are no labels that completely apply to the entire me. I am a “student”, for example. But I am not solely a “student”.
I am also, a “sister”, a “writer”, an “aunt”, a “girlfriend”, an “Islander”, an “Anglophone”, a “university graduate”, a “high school graduate”, a “twenty-five-year-old”, a “sister”, a “woman” and many other things. Yes, I am all of these things and yet, somehow the sum of their description is still inadequate.

And it is not just these titles that are inept in describing the whole truth about who I am, it is also that I never seem to fully fit any one title in a normal way. I always manage to alter these titles in some way. It’s as though I get anxious when the confines of one particular title feel a little too tight. I have to wiggle around in them until they become titles that are completely my own, titles that are somehow different for me than they are for all the other “students”, “Islanders” and “sisters” out there.

Take, for example, this very blog. The fact that surely no one else has the title and description, “Natalie, Sans “H”, A Digital Diary: Documentations of one woman’s adventures in and Around Montreal” notwithstanding, the actual content of my blog does not really fit. In truth, the blog is too big. It spreads and bleeds and oozes and leaks out of this title. It cannot be contained. I don’t just write about my experiences in Montreal. Far from it. I write about anything and everything that crosses my mind.

Another example: When I worked at the Dalhousie Gazette, I often got criticized for publishing articles about artists outside of the realm of the campus. Since we were a campus newspaper, it only seemed natural to keep the paper’s content exclusive to campus affairs. But something inside of me felt uncomfortable with these strict boundaries. I needed to feel freer, to expand. And this is what I’m like in all areas of my life.

So when I recently took several government tests as part of the protocol for entering the government job selection process, I figured, yeah, maybe I’ll work for the government. Who cares? I won’t be a typical government worker, I’ll just make the job fit me and my way of doing things; as I have done with everything else.

But shortly after I got into the testing room I realized that “government worker” was no ordinary title.

The truth is, I usually find a way to serve my best interests. And my best interests include moving to PEI sometime in the future. When I saw the PEI government job opening, I knew it was an opportunity for me to have some stability and therefore, a reason to move back. There was only one problem: The job was only open to people currently residing on PEI, and I live in Quebec.

So I lied. I gave my mother’s address as my own on the application, and figured they’d never know the difference.

And they didn’t. But they probably will now, since I’m writing about it on the internet. They are the government after all; it’s their business to find out secrets about potential employees.

But honestly, I couldn’t care less if they found out I lied. I almost want them to have a reason to drop me out of the running. The tests were a nightmare. I hated every second of them. The first one was a “General Competency Test”; which tested one’s ability to logically solve problems in an administrative environment. Please. I don’t have time to sit around thinking of who deserves more overtime hours, Larry or Susie. Because that’s the kind of questions the test asked. There was no option of “What do I care? Let them work it out for themselves”.

The second test was a French writing evaluation. And this one was very simple. I whizzed through each question with such flippancy I was sure the test supervisors thought I was cheating. Here’s an example of what a French writing test question looked like:

« Il y aura une réunion demain à 9h00. » This statement implies that:
a) there will NOT be a meeting.
b) the meeting will be at 11:00 today.
c) you have been asked to work overtime.
d) there will be a meeting tomorrow at 9:00.

In short, it was a joke.

The third and final test was a French reading evaluation. During this test I almost fell asleep at least three times. The questions each included a lengthy paragraph, the purpose of which I can hardly imagine had much to do with anything other than rendering its readers unconscious. They used up about half le Petit Robert just to communicate a simple message. It was ridiculous:

(In French): “Given the extreme weather circumstances of several rainy days in a row, and as you know, the fact that the three managers in sector A have been car-pooling, the result of which includes the breakdown of manager 1’s 1996 Honda Accord, it has come to our attention that the annual Sector A, B and C July Strawberry Social or—as some have called it of recent—the picnic that includes strawberry shortcake, similar to the shortcake that was popularized in the Anne of Green Gables series, thanks to, and we all know and love her dearly, L.M. Montgomery, without further ado, must be postponed until the weather improves.”

In the above paragraph, the picnic has been cancelled due to:
a) Anne of Green Gables.
b) a shortage of strawberry shortcake.
c) the absence of Manager 2.
d) the rainy weather.



So those were the tests on which I wasted 6 hours of a beautiful day on PEI; and after which I got to thinking. Do I really want to be a Bilingual Administrative Support Representative for the Government? I decided the best way to find my answer was a good old-fashioned pros and cons list:

Pros:
-great salary
-great benefits
-stability on PEI

Cons:
-excessive boredom
-lack of freedom
-zero passion
-job hatred
-zero creativity
-sedentary lifestyle
-wasted education
-loss of soul

So there you have it. Even if I gave up and gave in to an easier financial time working for the government, I would be a complete sell-out on my own terms and I would hate my life. There is no way I could have any wiggle room with a title like “Bilingual Administrative Support”. How do I spin it so that something like that fits me? How do I make a title like that my own? I guess the answer is, I don’t.

So I’ll keep having the collection of titles I have. They may not represent my entire identity, but they at least show some part of me, and I don’t have to feel like a total fraud by calling myself a “sister” or a “student”. Until I find a better one, I suppose the one that best suits is, “Natalie, Sans ‘H’”.