It finally happened. You applied at every retail outlet, every last fast food restaurant, every single place that you had the slightest connection to, and after weeks of waiting around, someone was actually thick enough to hire you. A trickle of excitement runs down your spine. Before long, you'll be a real life employee. You'll serve customers, you'll clean, you'll clock in and clock out and finally make money. This is it, your first step towards independence.

Does any of that sound familiar? Do you remember a time when you were actually excited to get a phone call from your work place, happy about trying on your uniform? Of course you don't. Your first job sucked from day one. Getting hired didn't fill you with excitement. It filled you with dread and anxiety.

Sure you were making money, you were becoming independent, but before you clocked in for the first time it never occurred to you how much independence bites.

And it did, by the way. Because once you got that first paycheck, the world didn't open up like you thought. In fact, it closed up. Tight. Behind tickets booths that asked for money your parents were no longer going to give you, gas pumps that required your debit card for you to actually get anywhere. You weren't making very much money, and once you factored out the loss of the handouts from your parents, you discovered you were more broke than you ever were, and with even less time.

That should sound like a more related first job experience. I'm not writing this to drudge up bad memories from your first outing into the real world, or to instill even more dread into those of you who are coming up on application season, but rather to remind everyone to appreciate this time in our lives.

Your first job taught you how to persevere. How to hate something and just keep doing it because you've got to. How to know you're miserable but stay right where you are just so you can pay for the education you need to do something that'll matter someday, that'll really make you happy. Your first job taught you that sometimes life just sucks for a while, but that if you stick with it, work hard, push through, it'll empower you to take the action necessary to make your life want you want it to be.

So if you are someone about to apply for their first job, or you just started working and already hate it, good. You should. I genuinely hope someone spills coffee on you, that your manager yells and huffs and puffs, that your customers are needy and greedy. Because the light always looks best when you've been in the dark for a while.

Thanks for the read!