Calling upon community input, advice, and perspective

[Jetfire300]

Hi, thank you for taking the time to stop by to read this. I've exhausted the productive outlet options that I can openly, and willingly, speak about this to. I'd be very meaningful to me, personally, to hear any input/counsel you might have to offer about what I'm sharing. In essence, my current line of inquiry/thoughts are unsettling/worrisome to me and have skewed my perception towards alarm and purposelessness.

I'm currently career EMS and there's nothing I want nothing more than to expand into firefighting. There is no acceptable future where I envision failing to earn my spot there. I am currently in the process with several Fire & Rescue agencies, and so that has been my focus for the past 3 months. The order of candidate procession is a (borderline pervasive) personal history statement, written exam, IAFF CPAT, polygraph, psychiatric & physical health screening, and fire panel interview. I've made it to the final selection group with my first choice agency and am scheduled to undergo their psychiatric evaluation, which I believe I will fail with absolute certainty. My full attention is on the fact that I suspect I am a hilariously poor fit due to various possible underlying psychological conditions and personal observations that I am very concerned are indicators of possible future warning signs.

It is not my intention, nor desire to employ an attempt at deception or an otherwise disingenuous persona to bypass this. I would rather cast aside career fire if I do not even possess the requisite qualities in me to begin with; although I refuse to accept that at this time and try to maintain optimism that I do have what it takes. Furthermore, it would also be beyond reckless and arrogant to believe that a doctor could be fooled by any of that. That is not to say that many career folks have successfully manipulated favorable outcomes within their processes to earn their posts at varying degrees of long-term success.

To prepare, I started researching the logistics pretty comprehensively to plan out my strategy. I will be required to answer a 400-500 item DSM-5-TR psychiatric questionnaire at the department psychiatrist's office. Followed by an interview with the mentioned psychiatrist where they will dig for discrepancies in my responses, in addition to baiting reactions that reveal previously undetected disqualifying aptitude qualifiers. It is apparently an all day commitment. I have also taken note, with reservations, about the numerous war stories I've heard/read about from previous candidates who were DQed at this stage.

I don’t mean to cast any aspersions in saying that fire agencies are borderline exclusionary on the career side. I agree with it. It's for good reason and it's probably written in blood that some are born for this while other's are not. The FD uses a lot of resources to seek out a specific personality profile. Extremely extroverted, extremely agreeable, and extremely conscientious. Basically they are looking for a extremely reliable people pleaser, loves to talk, and make friends. Who also loves to work teams, hates being late, hates being unorganized and always keeps their promises. It is in the design of the process and tests in of themselves to discriminate against you when you display even slightly introverted propensities to ultimately screen those candidates out in favor on the former. Scoring as this psychological profile with those qualities (evidently just having this affect as apart of your individual) seems to be a fringe hard requirement to my knowledge.

A psychiatrist I was consulting informally identified PTSD, Cognitive Dissociative Disorder, and generalized depression symptoms 3 years prior. I don't think I knew how or was equipped with the means to appropriately address this information head on and I have just been been getting by using my own life long strategies.

The present circumstances necessitate that I deal with and attempt to resolve/mitigate this in earnest. This is an impossible task and not something that can simply be "fixed" right away. It is also something that I can only work towards and gradually improve upon over time. And yet, this is who I am as person and I will not shy away of that. I'm proud that I'm as well adjusted to my surroundings as I am and of the efforts I made to restructure my old attitude and mentality.

All that aside, I feel very confident in my other aspects that will be evaluated. The issue is that I am very aware that I have developed maladaptive strategies and mannerisms to get by and these will overshadow any positive qualities. There is a depth to these behaviors that I do not have the expertise to comprehend and what might be seen as acceptable and what isn't. Everyone naturally owns their personal set of adversity and difficulties, so I question the extent of transparency that can be given? And at what extent does it talk yourself out of a dream job by echoing the phrase that "straightforward honesty is no virtue"?

I have the general belief that most people are self-motivated and remain skeptical on the existence of true altruism in our society. I'm primarily introverted, which place a lot of effort to offset by forcing extroverted affect and practicing it. My personal philosophies, especially on concepts I have put a lot of time, effort, and thought towards, are relatively hard for me to augment. These are all problematic beliefs that I have.

My old way of going about my life when I was younger still holds a profound impact on my mind in all of its anti-social faculties, and likely always will. Unbeknownst to all, I was caught up in a lifestyle involving various illicit activities until my early 20's. I had issues with substance abuse in the past as well. I lived by a very misguided set of principles and it's caught up to me in the sense that this is all information that I can never share with anyone and need to actively conceal. These are a huge no-no in the fire service. In the interest of context, I can offer a PHS statement I had submitted that ended in my immediate disqualification in one process. Wrong time for truth serum.

"I will speak my mind and heart in as much detail as possible without reservations. I will not shy away from any value judgements on myself as an individual. Frankly, I had no concept of meaningful life purpose until I started working in EMS. My circumspect expression in the following statement is to preserve impartiality in contextualizing the inquiry. Every aspect of my development was founded on the inescapable parameters of academic performance, prestige, relative peer superiority, and public adulation to fulfill the function of judging my individual worth; my results dictated my treatment. I remember feeling I had run out of options while tolerating what seemed an unending state of psychological duress. I became despondent towards my own life and was unbothered using antisocial behavior as a conduit for frustration. Still, my fear of the consequences deterred from getting caught. My grades were sufficient for entry to university. I felt profound anger and detachment at this time. I had the polarized ideology to succeed at any cost and proclaimed, from that point onwards, that my accolades would be so extraordinary to the extent that they would reach across the world. I set out with the presupposition that acceptance and validity would come afterwards and achieved a strong performance record on paper at severe personal expense. My attempt at starting a career using an identical mindset was destined towards feelings of futility and emptiness. In that context, I'm usually limited to feelings of self-gratification and satisfaction at a job well done, proportional to the task difficulty. So it's hard for me to to distinguish between the two from authentic happiness. But I also want to be very clear that I will never lose the ideal that I will someday achieve happiness with some degree of permanence. Currently, I've also made finding reasons to be happy as a full time job."

In summary, I've deliberately withheld information that would immediately disqualify me in all my other active processes from the lesson I learned by sharing too much with that other agency. It's a miracle in of itself that I even made it through a lie detector. I have serious self doubts about this even being something that I can ever achieve and whether I have no other choice but to essentially believe in, and live a lie about my life to cheat. And whether it's worth the risk of eventually questioning everything that comes further down the line if I find success by being something that I simply am not. I think it's dangerous ideology and not something I'd like to deliberate.

Apologies, I realize that this may be an upsetting thing to read. I am taking more serious consideration towards the choice of suicide depending on the outcomes of what I have currently and near future. I don't think I'd be willing to perceive any further purpose in my life if I fail at this. I can confidently say that I truly don't care to search for/discover more meaning or reasons to live. I have no desire to continue perpetuating the motions towards what I see as a dead end career-wise (private EMS agencies) and I've reached a point where I'd be content to put a period on whatever the heck this was in the first place. My desire is to see out one more round of attempts if this round does not go as planned.

Thanks for providing the platform for me to write all this. It's been immensely helpful to get this all off my chest. This was quite a long read so thank you for staying with it. Thank you in advance to those with insight or absolutely anything in general to contribute.