COVID-19 has been very good to me. It might sound like a horrible thing to say, but I've really enjoyed these last couple of years. I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment either. When the lockdowns started a couple of years ago, I was dumbfounded at first. I mean, I'd been working restaurants for years and there was always an element of fear in losing a job. Restaurants close everyday for all sorts of reasons. I suppose I always knew that, and at the end of every shift I ever worked, I was prepared for that shift to be the last. Of course, being a restaurant person and knowing this, I was always assured that I could simply walk into another restaurant and get a job. Suddenly, all the restaurants were closed.
What was especially stunning about the lockdown was this: we had no idea when were going to be able to get back to work. Like most of my colleagues, I spent that first lockdown, ten weeks, doing what you'd expect from a restaurant person. I cooked and I drank. It was a wonderful time.
Something very usual happened at the end of the ten weeks. Come the end of May, I was faced with going back to work. There was a great deal of discussion about it at home. Ultimately, we decided it was probably best for me to forgo restaurant work. Knowing that the restaurant where I worked was an exceptionally busy one and I would be exposed to who knows what and then bring it home was nothing my family wanted.
I don't know how many other people spent the early months of the pandemic soul searching like I did, but I think there were a great many of us. I felt like everything that I thought was important really wasn't. And to further that thought, there was this new insight to what was important: being with family, being healthy, and trimming the extraneous.
I decided to go back to school. This has been a pattern of mine over the years. When I'm faced with new challenges, I've always gone back to school. I know that not everyone has this available to them. I've heard many people say that they can't afford to go back to school, but I feel like it's the other way around: you can't afford to not go to school.
Ultimately, I did go back to work in the restaurant. I did it for a year. One year, 365 days, not one day more. I was over it, I really was and it was a tricky year to say the least. But I needed to get out of the house a little bit, I was with old friends and doing tasks that were not very taxing on me. At the beginning of the year I was in the head space as a student. By the end of the year, I was already thinking about design, and being a graphic designer, which was the course of study in school.
Leaving the restaurant was no difficult task.
Moving onto the next career is another story entirely.
It comes to me now that there are very different rules to procuring work than how it's done in the restaurant. It's not quite as easy as walking into a graphic design firm, filling out an application, asking to see a manager and having a conversation about when I can start. I mean, now there are other things to think about: portfolios, resumes, leave behinds, followups. It's something completely new to me. I've never really had to look for job.
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
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