The Introvert

It’s been more than two years since I last blogged on my website, and for that, I apologize to everyone who has always supported my writing projects. But I promise to do better, starting now, with a post inspired by the message I received in church today.

In 2013, I began attending church regularly, and in 2015, I got baptized. Going through life without God became too exhausting, even at the early stages of my life in my late teens and early 20s, so I decided it was time to make a change. Since making that change, I have found that life is so much easier to live knowing that I have someone stronger than me to lean on when times get tough, and someone to thank when times are harmonious. This post is about a journey that I embarked on nearly three years ago, and the impact that God had on me every step of the way.

After graduating from Hampton in 2014, I moved back home to DC and began looking for work. I never had any issues getting interviews but my lack of post graduate experience seemed to be the big hang-up, even for internships (on a side note, it’s amazing how jobs, and even internships, want you to have experience fresh out of college, but they don’t want to give you the opportunities to, ya know, gain the damn experience…but I digress).

So, after working a series of freelance positions and internships my first few years out of school, I finally started getting some serious looks from jobs, and even got to a few final round interviews for several full-time positions. While I wasn’t offered any of these positions, and the disappointment as a result was profound, my confidence was building that something was coming.

In July of 2016, I had several interviews for internships and full time positions, and I was actually offered three different positions within the span of a week. I was offered a part time internship working 29 hours a week, making $10 an hour, a full-time internship making $14 an hour, and a full-time position making $35,000 a year with full benefits.

After all of the struggles I had been through since graduating, you’d think I would have automatically jumped at the full-time position, with no questions asked, right? Well, I didn’t, and God played a big part in the decision I ultimately made.

When I interviewed for the full time position I was offered, I had a funny feeling during and after the interview. As an introvert, I’m naturally pretty nervous around new people until I develop a rapport with them, but during this particular interview, I never really got a sense of comfort. Even when I was given a writing assessment to test my abilities, I still felt uneasy when I was doing the thing that puts me the most at ease, which is writing. Something was just off, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time, and even now, I’m still not entirely sure what it was about that job that made me feel the way I felt.

When trying to make my decision of what position to take, it was disheartening that I felt more comfortable with the two internships versus the full-time job, because the whole time leading up to these offers, I was working for the offer of a full-time job. Ultimately though, I decided to follow my gut, and I decided to accept the full-time internship over the other two positions, with no guarantee that it would last past the three month time span it was originally scheduled to last. I was taking a bit of a leap of faith, but I figured, God brought me this far, so I might as well keep going to see what he had in store for me. There was something about this position that gave me a polar opposite feeling of the full-time position that I couldn’t seem to shake.

I started my new position in July, and fast forward to the middle of October, I was offered a full-time position with the organization, with benefits, after there was some turnover in my department. I also received a full-time offer from another company, which made it a little easier to ask if there was any opportunity for an expanded role within the organization.

When I received the offer with my current organization, nearly two and a half years after graduating, the feeling of jubilation was…indescribable. After hearing so many ‘no’s’ and ‘you’re good but not quite good enough,’ it felt amazing to finally be told ‘you’re good enough, we value you, and we want you.’ It felt even better in this instance being with this organization, since I really went out on a limb taking a position with an expiration date in hopes that it would result in something full time. Previous internships I had worked had always told me that there was the chance the positions could go full time, but nothing ever materialized, until now. And the only way that I even got to this point was by following my intuition, which I believe was just God nudging me down the road that I am currently on.

I’m not the most overtly religious person, and I damn sure don’t have all of the answers when it comes to religion. I understand why people are turned off by religion; hell, for a long time I was turned off by it after my experiences in the church. But I do believe that there is a church out there for everyone, and that there are messages spoken in the church that are applicable to everyone. I really think it’s about being open and willing to search for what you like and what you don’t like to find the perfect, or at least best, church home for you.

Some people go through life on their own, and they do just fine. That’s how I was for a long time. But at a certain point, I think we all need someone to lean on that is stronger than any human or physical being on this earth. The message of today’s sermon in my church was basically that no matter what we go through, God will always be there to show us His glory, and that there is nothing He can’t see us through. I am a firm believer in that, and in the idea that God only puts us through what we can handle. God knew that I could handle the constant rejections, and probably helped me dodge some positions that weren’t right for me, only to reward me with the position that is perfect for me. But I first had to open myself up and allow Him to help me through the tough times, so that He could guide me to the good times.

Conversations about God, religion, spirituality, and everything around those subjects are some of my favorite things to converse about it nowadays, so if you’d like to talk about any of those things, please feel free to contact me. I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you for reading this, and I promise, I’ll be back sooner than later.

B, The Introvert