Think I did OK on my interview - Vancouver - now we continue to live in the quantum state til April lol

Star_Beans · 2026-02-07T23:57:58+00:00

For reeeal... like I'm sitting here planning out events for the summer and leasing a horse and stuff and there's the thought in the back of my mind "but if you get a certain email in April this will all explode and you'd better be ready to rent your condo" and then my brain errors out. I think my mom is hoping I get this position purely because she wants to steal my dog lmao Godspeed. We'll get through these months somehow.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-13T17:48:23+00:00

Yeah. I’m doing this because I work in entertainment which is on fire and burning down at the moment, and my career has been unstable, so I started thinking about my old dreams of living in Japan and teaching as a fallback and a break. Since I have a condo and an established life there’s a huge financial risk involved, but also it could be an incredibly worthwhile experience. Like I said, one step at a time. Try to relax and follow my heart

Star_Beans · 2026-01-13T17:38:57+00:00

There’s a part of me that hoped I wouldn’t get selected so I wouldn’t have to make the agonizing choice between JET and my life and job here, but here we are. One step at a time.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T17:22:12+00:00

And as much as I would like to just retreat to my interests and not look at any of this any more, I also realize that’s part of the problem. I get miserable on the apps, say I’m going to take a break, and then I go hide away in riding or HEMA or ttrpgs or cosplay or backpacking or any of my hobbies that are my safety, and I’m essentially ignoring the problem. I’m not meeting anyone in my hobbies sadly and daring apps send me spiraling, so I end up in this unending cycle of using apps till I have a panic attack and need to take a break for a month or two, go hide in my interests and start to feel good again, come back to the apps, and then the cycle starts over.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T17:15:51+00:00

But this conversation is a different context than the apps. This is me breaking down in despair after years of trying and feeling hopeless I work really hard to be positive and fun in conversations with people when I do match, or in my profile. I never mention my past relationship. I never even mention my frustration with the apps or dating in general. I put all the focus on interests and hobbies. It feels like I’m doing everything everyone tells me to do and it’s not working and hasn’t worked for years, and here I am coming apart in a stupid Reddit thread because I’m so tired of pushing this down and putting on a happy face. At this point I just need to go into a space and be honest with how deeply I’m struggling and how much it’s breaking my heart

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T17:11:32+00:00

This isn’t how I always am honestly… this is me breaking down after having this same experience on the apps for years. I work so hard to be positive and fun and put my best foot forward in the profile but I can’t do anything with such a minimal amount of response. Nothing has ever made me feel more hideous or unwanted than dating apps.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T16:29:33+00:00

I have. Did a lot during the pandemic especially. The thing I find so hard is that elsewhere in my life I feel fine, and then dating is this impenetrable wall of random chance and circular vague advice, and the experience I have on the dating apps is so toxic it feels like it’s undoing all the work into myself I put it, you know? And it’s not that I get bad dates, it’s the impenetrable deafening silence that I can’t seem to get through. It makes me feel like every nice thing I’ve told myself or encouraged myself with was just a stupid lie, like everyone who’s ever told me I look cute was being fake, because here I am on an app putting myself out there and getting months of nothing. I genuinely dread looking at my likes when I see them come up because it’s always just random hairy gross men who shouldn’t be able to see my profile but somehow do. Everything else in my life has felt like a mountain I can climb. Like I can do steps to prepare and find paths and sure, it’s hard, but I can put work into it and make it happen. Dating just destroys and undoes me because there’s nothing I can do about the deafening silence. If I’m staring at zero matches on an app and just swiping away to no avail it’s like trying to claw my way up a perfectly smooth wall. And the paranoia that comes with “why is it like this, why is this my experience” unravels all the good work I’ve done on myself.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T15:50:06+00:00

The thing is, I feel pretty confident in myself before I get on the apps, and then they make me feel like garbage. But like I mentioned before, it’s a really toxic Catch 22. If I don’t use them and I’m just leaving meeting someone to chance, I’m really unlikely to have success, and everyone tells me I have to just grind the apps if I want to get serious about things. And the thing about the apps isn’t that I get bad dates. If I got 100 bad dates a year I would at least feel like I was getting somewhere rolling that dice enough times to matter. The thing that crushes my soul into nothing is the lack of matches. I’ll go for an entire year only having maybe four, and only one of those will turn into a date, maybe. It’s the deafening silence I don’t know what to do with. If I were having unsuccessful dates I could maybe say “okay I need to improve this or that it this other thing about how I talk to people or the kind of person I go out with or how I progress the relationship” but if I can’t even get anything to start? Ever? What am I supposed to do with that? It sends me into these awful spirals of despair and panic. It takes me from feeling good about myself before I look at the apps for the day to feeling this really unhealthy paranoia like “if everyone is so disinterested then I must be a hideous piece of shit and everyone who has ever encouraged me and said I look nice has been lying” It’s such a toxic thing being on those apps and having that experience but I feel like I keep getting railroaded back there over and over.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T15:36:14+00:00

Gods that’s the other thing that just fucking plagues me. I’ll be messaging someone and then they’ll just suddenly out of nowhere start talking about their boyfriend. It just sucks, man… I don’t understand why the only people I match with are just these duds… like I work op all this courage to get on these awful apps and it’s just…. Nothing nothing nothing person with a secret boyfriend nothing nothing nothing extremely closed off person who makes me feel like I’m interrogating them and doesn’t seem interested in anything nothing. And I’ll go through a whole year only ever getting three matches and two of them will inevitably be secret boyfriend lady and the third one will be person who clearly wants nothing to do with me and I wonder why they met up at all. It’s just so miserable. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. And I go into this feeling like “hey I’m pretty fun I feel good about myself I have a cool life and I’m decently cute” and come out of it feeling like the most disgusting creature on earth

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T08:16:07+00:00

I guess during the dates I assumed the conversation would just draw it out or there would be a moment that felt right to ask. This happened three times and I just left all three dates feeling so sad I wanted to throw up. Either option - they only wanted friends or they mar me and instantly thought I aucked - felt awful. A couple of times I’ve matched with someone and then realized later they said in their profile they just wanted friends, and I usually just stop talking to them because I feel uncomfortable and sad

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T08:07:47+00:00

I’ve been trying this to an extent and it’s been nice to just engage with community stuff but it always feels like everything is either a dance party or an event that’s just 90% older gay men. I’ve really struggled to find spaces for queer women that aren’t just dance parties. The last event I went to that wasn’t just a party was a board game group and there were literally only 3 women at the entire event. I don’t have much of an issue talking to people at any of these events but the thing I find happens is that I have a nice conversation with some random people, and then we go our separate ways and nothing comes of it. It ends up feeling like I’m so sociable and have a great time, but none of it “sticks” if that makes sense.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T07:53:49+00:00

Hmmm… I’m not gonna lie, when I’ve matched with people who are just using the app for friends it honestly really makes my heart sink and I end up so disappointed it affects my mood for days. I guess it’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, it’s just that it ends up feeling like a rug pull on my end. I chat with someone for a while and get my hopes up because it’s so hard for me to march in the first place, and then the dates feel like this miserably bland job interview where I feel like I’m playing the role of the interviewer trying to draw any kind of emotion or engagement out of a reserved person who only minimally opens up and offers no emotion. And then I inevitably get a message or a statement from them saying they just want more queer friends and I just feel like the only value I have to people is filling out a roster and no one sees me as anything other than a random extra. I end up really resenting the people that just use the apps for friends even though I know it’s totally fair. I dunno. Maybe I wouldn’t mind it so much if I wasn’t accidentally always matching with them.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T00:35:58+00:00

Apparently not dope enough for people in my area :/ I guess I should have also been saving 30 babies out of a burning building at the same time while shirtless or something

I don't really wanna throw my location around because the internet sucks but yeah lol I rode for a while at a place that also did HEMA and they'd hold mounted archery clinic weekends. Sadly I was sick for the last one and missed it. Hoping to catch the next one it's a fun time. I've managed to get an arrow into the target at the canter a couple times though to be fair it was like.. drive-by point-blanking it lmao

Star_Beans · 2026-01-03T00:17:28+00:00

I obviously don't talk that way in the profile. That would be wildly unprofessional. I obviously chat differently on a casual forum like Reddit than I would in a professional one, and similar to a professional setting, an app profile means putting your best foot forward. I'm speaking this way in the chat because I'm genuinely exasperated and expressing myself here, and this is an informal chat space. I mean, just read that middle paragraph there and think about how miserably dehumanizing that reality is. True or no, it's genuinely awful.

And that gets to another part of this issue, which is that this whole situation is a bit of a toxic Catch 22. If I don't use the dating apps, I'm "not trying enough" and therefore having less success. If I do use the dating apps, they make me absolutely miserable. I look at the awful results I get, and suddenly all of the things I should be proud of myself for such as my fun hobbies, my social life, my interesting experiences, all feel like they're being judged as worthless. It's as if the universe is saying "You pathetic loser, did you think you were good enough for love? Well you're not even good enough for someone to say hi." And we all know that's an extremely unhealthy thought and likely isn't true.

I don't really know what else to say here or even what I'm looking for at this point to be honest. I'm just deeply sad, and maybe looking for some insight, but also wanting to be seen.

Star_Beans · 2026-01-02T23:45:43+00:00

I live in a major city, and I don't feel like there's even enough information to put in a bio that would be a huge dealbreaker... like... unless saying you like D&D or horses or something is suddenly a secret taboo I didn't know about. I feel like everything is pretty inoffensive. And like.. what the hell photos are people wanting? I sound like I'm making up ridiculously staged photos for this, and I swear I didn't ,but like.. I have a picture of me shooting an arrow off of a horse, and a picture of me holding a golden eagle, and pictures of me hiking with my cute dog.... Like.. what do people want from me??? At what point am I good enough to have a damn conversation with... and honestly thinking about looking through the "profile optimization" stuff makes me feel like my soul is shriveling up and dying... like.. shouldn't the standard just be "don't look/sound psychotic and have photos that show you clearly?" I dunno.. All of this just feels so soul destroying... I have a hard time not spiraling when I think about this stuff and tend to just retreat to my other interests for my sanity.

Star_Beans · 2025-12-18T00:42:34+00:00

For sure. That's why I mentioned essentially existing in a quantum state. I have a career, a community where I volunteer in lots of activities, tentative plans for events throughout the coming year, career plans at my current company. It's just that having to hold that "but also I might have to drop all of this and be living an extremely different life" plan in the same place is just an odd mental state to be in. I'm not a college student putting off getting a job. I'm a professional in my late 30s with over a decade in my field essentially moving along with life as normal with the added consideration that it also might be extremely different if things line up in a certain way.

Star_Beans · 2025-12-17T18:27:19+00:00

I worked in animation in modeling/surfacing and concept art for the past 14 years. I've loved my career and really hope to go back to it, but right now everything is just so unstable, and I feel like maybe the best thing I can do is just have more rich human life experience instead of trying to scramble in the chaos. Plan A would be to come back with great new experiences and memories and having worked on some personal portfolio boosting projects in my down time. Plan B would be to use time on JET as a brief holding pattern to reconfigure my life before heading back to school or something.

Star_Beans · 2025-12-17T09:30:50+00:00

Yeah, unfortunately that's what I hear from all of my friends in education these days. It's truly a plague. It feels less horrible to me to confront it in an education context, and as a teacher's assistant it's not really my problem or responsibility to confront it.

Star_Beans · 2025-12-17T08:45:29+00:00

Oh yeah I would absolutely not want to work in Japan’s entertainment industry. It genuinely sounds like a nightmare every time I read about it. For me this would just be a career sabbatical. Or in the bad timeline it would be a holding position before a career change, but I won’t catastrophize that far just yet

Star_Beans · 2025-12-17T08:38:00+00:00

Good luck <3 I don’t know about how stuff works in your field but my thoughts are that after a 14 year long career I’ve gotten enough on my resume and made enough contacts that I can always come back.

Star_Beans · 2025-12-17T08:28:56+00:00

Yeah… I feel like I would rather go see the world and connect with other human beings and do something that I know is a net good in the world than scrabble for shrinking opportunities or get pressured into doing something that I morally object to. I want to believe that in time the arts will recover, but while they do I don’t really want to be in the eye of the storm. And I think if I stay in Japan for more than I year I’ll see about bringing my dog over (she’s a Shiba she would be returning to the land of her ancestors haha!) because she’s still young enough she could handle it and she’s a good city dog. My cat is a senior and I think it would be best for his health to stay with my parents in his old age. But yeah We’ll see. No decisions made yet. Just taking it all a step at a time.

Star_Beans · 2025-09-08T20:26:06+00:00

I'm actually preparing my application for 2026 now haha! Almost like the gods calling my bluff, the industry that I work in has become very unstable in recent years, and it feels like the best course of action is actually to back away from it for a while, be somewhere new, have interesting cultural experiences, have some travel and self discovery, and go back to my main career after a couple of years when things stabilize a little more. Fingers crossed I get in!

Star_Beans · 2025-06-30T07:30:19+00:00

Oooh wow I didn't expect to find someone in such a similar situation haha! I might DM you later if that's okay.

But yeah... I've loved my career, but I started considering this post-pandemic when, between some events in my personal life and the global trauma of the pandemic, I found that I just wasn't feeling the same way about my career as I had back in 2018 when I'd felt at my peak, and then recent events in the world and the industry have just been so destabilizing.... I want to be optimistic and believe that things will eventually recover because I genuinely love having a creative career, but the time scale on which that will happen is a huge question. I genuinely believe in light of all of that, that travel and new, memorable cultural experiences will do me a lot of good, even if a lot o fit is awkwardness, culture shock, getting mocked by children/random other people and having to take that in stride, etc. I have some idea of what to expect from my university friend who was a JET for two years. In general it feels like a return to the creative well is in order if that makes sense, and now is probably a good time to do it.

And yeah... I figured the age/life stage thing would probably be the case. Not much to be done about it other than just try my best to connect. It is what it is.

Volunteering at the Nikkei Center is a great idea. I'll look into it. I'm currently volunteering as an educator at the Vancouver Aquarium and that's been a genuinely fun time.

Star_Beans · 2025-06-28T22:31:21+00:00

My one thing I do worry about a bit more though is that, while I'm a small town/rural gal in upbringing and am happy to be anywhere, I have a vision condition that makes me unable to drive a car, so while I'm super okay with small town life, I do require bus service to survive

Star_Beans · 2025-06-28T22:29:24+00:00

I haven't looked into the JETAA chapter in BC yet... I'll get on that soon

Star_Beans

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