#and just general hopelessness that mostly goes unchallenged

[another-whump-sideblog]

Masterlist

"Can you explain this gap in your resume?"

"I was abducted and tortured for years."

The interviewer stares at her. Waiting for her to reveal it was a bad joke. But it's not. She stares back.

"...Okay. Uh, I think that's all I need, thank you."

Ema is not going to get that job. She's not going to get any of the jobs she's applied for since she escaped.

"You don't have to tell them what happened." Tom said. "You can lie. They won't know."

But Ema doesn’t want a job where she has to hide what happened. She also doesn’t want a job where everyone knows what happened to her. She doesn’t want to talk about it or think about it and she doesn’t want other people to talk about it or think about it, but she doesn’t want to hide it.

She doesn’t really want a job at all, right now. She always wanted to be a music teacher at some middle or high school, but her music hasn’t been very good lately. It’s been better, since she embraced that her music doesn’t have to sound beautiful, but it’s not near a quality where she would feel comfortable teaching others.

And she’d have to go back to school, anyway. She doesn’t have the money for that. She had scholarships, but they definitely don’t apply anymore. She’d have to get new music-based scholarships, and she can’t play music the way she used to, so she can’t go back to school.

Her life goal, the thing she’d been working towards for so long, is now impossible. Every job interview is a reminder that this is not what she wanted to be doing.

“What would you say is your greatest weakness?”

“I’m really bad at handling conflict and stress. I shut down.”

“Ah. Well, it was nice meeting you. We’ll be in contact.”

Ema will be lucky if she gets a rejection letter. Tom says that if she can’t work after what happened, that’s okay, and he can help her through the long and difficult process of getting disability payments. But that would require a diagnosis, and a diagnosis would require seeing more doctors or therapists and talking about what happened and, if she tries to get a PTSD diagnosis, how often she relives it, and then people will ask if she really can’t work or is just being lazy and all of that sounds worse than any job interview or possible job. So she tells him it’s fine.

“Can you lift 50 pounds or more?”

“No. I can’t reliably walk in a straight line either, and my grip strength is very weak.”

Ema has been feeling better since she started focusing on getting more of the vitamins she’s deficient in, but those things haven’t changed. They become more and more noticeable the more she tries to go back to living a normal life.

When not sending out her resume and attending job interviews, Ema has been spending a lot of time at a nearby music store, playing horrible music, trying to pretend she can still be the person she always wanted to be. That he didn’t ruin her entire life and body permanently and she’ll never be okay again-

The first time an employee came and tapped her on the shoulder, she was terrified they were going to kick her out for spending hours there without buying anything. But they just said hi, complimented her playing, and went back to work.

Over the course of weeks, the two spoke a few times. Nothing too deep, just small talk. Ema has learned that the employee’s name is Tina, that she’s 17, that she’s saving up for a car, and that she’s always chewing spearmint gum. And despite Ema never telling her, Tina has picked up on the fact that Ema doesn’t have a job, but needs one.

“Ema! Guess what?”

Ema doesn’t like being interrupted while playing, but she forces a friendly-ish smile. “What?”

“My co-worker is quitting! You could work here!”

“Oh, I’m not… I have a big gap in my resume, and I don’t have a degree, and I have neurological damage, so I have bad balance and grip strength. And I’m horrible at dealing with conflict. I doubt anyone will ever hire me.”

Tina pouts. “You don’t need balance or grip strength, it’s just the desk admin job. And I know what questions they ask in the interviews, and how to handle rude customers, so I can help you practice.”

Ema… wouldn’t hate working at a music store. But she shouldn’t get her hopes up. “I don’t have any experience with that.”

“It’s an entry level job, you don’t need experience. You should probably tell them you know how to use Excel, though.”

“I don’t.”

“Find a video online, it’s not that hard. And I can help, I have to use Excel for some of my projects at school.”

Tom’s been telling her that there’s nothing wrong with a little white lie in an interview or an application. And she knows the employees here already, if only a little, and she likes this place a lot. “Maybe. I guess it’s worth a shot.”

Tina grins. “That’s the spirit! I need to go do my job now, but I’ll give you some tips for the interview later, okay?”

Ema nods. Tom will be happy to hear that she’s willing to actually try, this time around.

A future is opening up in front of her. Not the big, all encompassing one from when she was a kid, where she became a teacher and won awards and learned to play every instrument in the world. A smaller one, where she goes to work at this desk admin job, then comes home and calls Tom to hang out if she feels up to it.

Everything she ever imagined her life would be is impossible now. Now, she starts to imagine something else.