My dad [63M] expects me [22F] to get a great job at a major streaming service and literally won’t talk to me about anything else. How can I talk to him about his unrealistic expectations of me?

Hi Reddit,

So I graduated college less than a year ago. This issue with my dad has been going on the entire time and has gotten way worse recently.

After graduation and despite graduating from a “good school” and having job experience, it took a while to find my two minimum wage, part-time jobs. He was obviously unhappy that I wasn’t living up to my potential, but I needed to financially support myself so I took what I could get.

During this past year, he ONLY talks to me about career. Never about anything else. He’ll trick me into thinking we’re going out for a nice dad-daughter bonding lunch, and then make me pull up my resume so we can edit it. It hurts that he asks “what did you apply to recently?” instead of “how are you doing? I know you went back to therapy recently.”

I agree that I’m not where I need to be, and I feel crushing shame about it every day of my life. And I’m trying to get into a tough industry: entertainment. I’m pretty depressed and I’m dealing with a lot of trauma in therapy, so it’s hard to focus on my career. But still, I was able to land a 10-day production assistant gig with a major network, because I had a networking connection and they reached out. Excited, I told him this! This is what he wanted from me, right? Nope. He basically ignored what I said, told me “Okay fine but you need a full-time long-term position. Have you been applying for Coordinator roles at (major streaming service)?”

He has it in his mind that I can just apply to be a Coordinator or a Director at every major streaming service and that I will get the job. I try to tell him that, yes, I’ll still submit my resume, but that there are hundreds of applicants within the first few days of people applying, and that they won’t even look at my resume for a higher-up position unless I have some lower-tier experience first. He doesn’t care. He even suggested I try to contact the CEOs of the major streaming services and see if they’ll have lunch with me. I’ve talked to my older friends who actually do work in the entertainment industry full time, and they told me that doing something like that might get me blacklisted rather than hired.

He calls and texts me several times a week about this, and has ramped it up over the past few weeks, saying this is the time to apply because everyone else is “in hibernation.” But right now, I’m very depressed and just trying to put in the effort to feed myself.

What can I tell him to get him to understand that it may take longer than he thinks for me to meet his expectations?

tl;dr: Dad doesn’t understand that I have to work my way up in the entertainment industry, and only interacts with me if it has to do with becoming Coordinator of major operations in the biggest streaming service in the world. How can I talk to him about this?

Submitted April 03, 2020 at 10:35AM by recycledstardust https://ift.tt/2UTtjGQ