Every attempt I've made to support myself has failed. I have successfully had paid employment for two years, part-time, and was fired because the bosses promised me a promotion, found out I didn't have skills needed for the new position which I had never given them any reason to believe I had, and they lacked the budget to train me. In the intervening four years, I've had nothing. My degree is in zoology; there are no animal care positions in any area I can get to without a car, since I can't drive and can't afford a car, and I cannot afford to move away, except for laboratories. I had one interview at an animal research lab and ran out in tears because the treatment of the animals is awful. I got interviews, which got me nothing but wasted bus fare I couldn't afford. I went to multiple coaches who explained how to behave at interviews and did exactly what they said to do and they told me I was wonderful, and I still got nothing. I tried setting up an Etsy shop, and I've had about five people total buy anything from me and it was invariably the tiny samples which were meant to get people to buy the big items, so now I'm a thousand pounds in debt to my parents and stuck with a few dozen bottles cluttering up my home which just will not sell whatever I do. I tried offering fanfic commissions and no one even looked at the post. I tried selling stories on Amazon and the only things which sell make me feel disgusting and take months to write because every sentence has to be dragged out of me like a pulled tooth, and when I got some things up nobody bought them. There is literally not one single solitary thing I can do which will get anyone on Earth to pay me to do it, and I don't know how to become able to, and every attempt just makes me feel more worthless when I inevitably fail. I'm tired of living on benefits and an allowance from my parents because they feel sorry for me.
I know this is probably not something you want to hear, but. What work can you do without your degree? What do you have available for anything else? I don't have a job in my field. I have a job at a fucking retail pharmacy and I got a degree in anthropology at 20. I've moved up, relatively, in that I'm in pharmacy now instead of just a cashier. But my degree hasn't gotten me anything so far in life. Maybe that's something to consider. If you can't get work in your field, can you get anything else?
I already tried that, I gave up on finding anything in the field because of the issues mentioned in the original post. I applied to every office job I could find going. Those were the interviews I got which went nowhere.
Are there any small agencies you can register with in your area? I did agency work for a spell - it paid decently and all the jobs were vetted by the agency before they placed you as a temp. The one I worked for didn't charge a registration fee or anything, because their profit came from charging out temp fees and they also handled tax and national insurance. I've been on both sides of the temp-hiring divide and can assure you that if you can smile, type, and do simple formulae in Excel, you're already doing better than at least half of their current temp pool.
I did a while back, and they didn't really do anything. I should probably try again but motivating myself to is hard because it failed last time.
