Rejoining “Society?”

I walked around the happy hour counter to where my manager, Emily, was standing. She looked up from her phone and smiled at me, “Do you two need anything?”

“No, I think we’re good,” I said, glancing back at my coworker who was also cleaning up the happy hour that we hosted at the Deer Valley ski resort we worked at in Utah.

Emily nodded, “So do you know what you are going to do after you leave here?”

I grinned knowing this was the big unanswered question in my life. I wasn’t exactly sure because I didn’t know what direction my life was going. Within a couple of months, I had been working in Utah, Emily had become one of my favorite managers ever. She had done multiple seasonal jobs in the past and loved how she managed the staff at Deer Valley.

“Umm, I don’t know. I might move to St. Louis,” I answered.

“Do it, I loved living in a city, and you could always come back to seasonal jobs.”

“True,” I said, nodding, “I’m probably going to, I just feel like I am not in the real world at times working seasonally.”

“Seasonal jobs aren’t the real world,” Emily laughed in agreement.

At this point in my life, I had done enough seasonal jobs to know the gist. I knew they were temporary. I knew they were full of adventure and out-of-this-world moments, but I also knew they were moments that created bliss. According to Google, bliss is moments of exuberant extreme happiness. Seasonal jobs can create that, but they also have their fair share of low moments.

In the past, I’ve had a lot of seasonal jobs blissful moments. My first seasonal job was in Allenspark, Colorado in the summer of 2017. The next summer of 2018, I worked in Hill City, South Dakota at a huge campground. The following summer in 2019, I worked in Healy, Alaska then spent the winter in Park City, Utah. For each seasonal job, I spent a lot of time staying up really late, meeting new friends, and LIVING A LOT.

When I was in Colorado, I felt like my life was beginning. One of the girls I met there had traveled all over the world and listening to her talk made me want to do the same. I wanted to travel the world. When I was in South Dakota, that experience was the epitome of living and it felt like college without the homework. I stayed up super late every night, and am so grateful for every adventure I went on there. My friends and I would go to Perkins at 12:30 am, we would lay in hammocks late into the night talking around a fire, I would pour the colorful flame powder onto the flames, I spent nights in hammocks, had lake days, drank way too many Seagrams, got free wine slushies and sipped them by the pool. One night we had a hot tub party and a ton of us sat in the hot tub until our skin became pruney.

When we were about to leave, I sprinted and leaped off the cement to plunge into the cool water of the pool. “Ella!” My friend, Skylar, shouted in disbelief, and I just gave her one of my wild smiles.

One night around the fire, my friend, Christine and I wanted Angry Orchards at 10:50 pm when the gift store closed at 11 pm. We convinced one of our other friends, Seabass to go into the gift shop because I felt so embarrassed and bad for going in around closing time. Seabass is the real MVP.

But this shows what nights were like having seasonal jobs: countless moments of spontaneity.

Colorado and South Dakota were not all perfect, but I loved the times I spent there. They were true moments of bliss. I felt as if nothing could touch me and my youth was boiling over in happiness. I was doing everything I was dreaming about: traveling, hiking, and meeting so many cool people. The morning it was time for me to leave South Dakota, I boarded the plane feeling so blissful and nostalgic for the summer.

After I graduated college, I worked two more seasonal jobs in Alaska and Utah. That is when I started to see more of the cons of seasonal jobs. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my time in those states as well and have so many amazing memories. I have written about both of those jobs a lot, and they consisted of moments of bliss.

When I was by myself at seasonal jobs in Alaska and Utah, I would feel incredibly lonely, suffer from some post-grad blues, and kept craving for more blissful moments. In Colorado and South Dakota they felt constant, but in Utah and Alaska, felt more spread out. I think it’s also because I wasn’t living with my friends. I liked my roommates, but we weren’t best friends. Also, I felt greedy for the time I wanted to spend with people. I worked with my friend Spencer in Alaska and my friends Agnes and Savannah in Utah, but I still wanted to spend so much time with them outside of work too which we did. I was unbelievably grateful for those moments and were definitely moments of bliss. In CO and SD, I was never alone and now, I was experiencing seasonal jobs that didn’t consist of just college kids. It was a lot more of a variety of people. I had definitely lost that sense of me who enjoyed being alone. Now, I dreaded it.

One thing I noticed is that your first experience of doing something was so full of euphoria when everything feels new and exciting. The first and second seasonal jobs could definitely be that way. My observation of following different people on Instagram who have done seasonal jobs. I would see posts saying the past months had been some of the best of their life after their first seasonal job. After a few more seasonal jobs, it seemed like the enthusiasm would not be as strong or they were thinking about doing something different or rejoining society.

The conversation I had with Emily made me think about rejoining society. I had been working the second shift since graduation so, at the time, I didn’t even remember the pains of waking up early. I stayed up overly late every night and was always sleeping in than heating up frozen meals for lunch. A lot of people don’t know about seasonal jobs and are definitely something that is under the radar. At times, I felt like I was hiding the lines of society aimlessly wandering through my life. I was trying to create these travel, gap year experiences. Some people make their way of life seasonal jobs, which is totally fine, but I never intended doing them forever. I just didn’t know if I was ready to rejoin the “regular” way of life. I was only twenty-three at the time and didn’t want to settle too early.

I would also always glamorize my college self into being way better than my postgrad self. When I was at work one day, I heard one of my coworkers saying her twenty-one-year-old daughter has her life together. I remember thinking I had my life together when I was twenty-one too. I know I had my life together now but didn’t feel like it at times. When I was twenty-one, I was in college living away from home in a different state, in very good running shape, living with people my age, had great friends, was majoring in my passion, and writing a lot. I felt pretty good about life back then. There was no doubt in my mind that I wasn’t going to accomplish my dreams. I would compare myself to a bright banana. Now my postgrad twenty-three-year-old self, the bright banana, had rotten. I was living at home in a place I never thought I would be living full-time in again. At times I would be working a lot so my workout routine would be all over the place. It was so hard to be so far away from my friends and move back home, I didn’t know a lot of people my age. I was meeting different writing goals than I originally planned. Overall, I felt like I wasn’t challenging myself or taking a hold of my youth which is something by now you know I truly believe in. I would think back to the seasonal job bliss.

When I would visit my friend’s apartments or houses, I would think about what it was like to live in a place to call your own. All I had lived in was dorms, apartments where I still shared a room, or at home with my parents. If I stayed in one place, I wouldn’t have to keep starting over in a new place to find a new community again. I was yearning for having my own room, having normal working hours, not having to meet new people all the time, and not having to say painful goodbyes to those new, wonderful people I was meeting. I would imagine what if I lived my life in my own place, but I knew that feeling would rub off eventually. It sounded too permanent, too stable, and something that I would get bored of after a while. I didn’t want to rush into this way of life just because I was having a few moments that were craving normalcy.

To be honest, I didn’t know very well how to dive back into the real world. Before I graduated, I had been studying abroad in Sweden so I was going on a year and a half of travel which I’m so grateful for. My life had been full of packing, unpacking, life carried in backpacks, and never staying in one place long enough to get settled. I would see people online dressed in business casual clothes and heels meanwhile I wore off-brand vans, old leggings, a stocking hat, and comfy hoodies to my ski resort job. I could never be a corporate person where my life was consumed by some business job. I would think of my lost mountainous summers, and all I strived for was a nomadic, creative life. I knew I had to start crawling out of the seasonal job/travel hole I had been living in.

Covid happened and made the hole of no career get even deeper. The decision to keep traveling or not was made for me. Since the job market was not at its best, the idea of starting my career got pushed back. I resorted to living at home and working two jobs while trying to fit in my writing on the side. I was working towards saving for grad school to pursue a career as a librarian and always work towards my writing. It took me a while even though it was the right decision, it took me some time to be happy with it.

A lot of good things happened. Actually, a lot of great things happened. More great things that I could ever happen imagine happening.

Had I rejoined society? In reality, I never really left. I was just living a different version of it. I will still think about if I kept doing seasonal jobs. What would my life be like? Who are the people I would have met? I’m content with what did by ending my seasonal career, and I will always remember those moments of bliss created in seasonal jobs of such fond memories.

Now, when I get on Instagram and see other people’s experiences from seasonal jobs and their bliss radiating off the screen. I am very happy and excited for them, but also feel for them. I would want to protect them from the confusion of what seasonal jobs can bring.

I’ll end this by saying I think the confusion and figuring out what to do with your life are all part of the process. Seasonal jobs might add to it, but they could also help it.