So Here I Sit in the Fire

So why the delay in getting this latest entry posted? I did have a lot to do at work the last few days, and I have my regular workouts that I have to make, but truth be told, I procrastinated a little. Okay, okay, I procrastinated a lot. I probably could have had this posted by Monday night if I had really put my mind to it, but I kept finding excuses.

It’s because this post is about how I arrived at “the point.” You know, the point where you just can’t take it anymore? I had to stop and think back (cue the “going back in time” harp music) to try to pinpoint how this really got started. If you don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re headed, I think. Well, at the very least you don’t know how you ended up “here,” wherever you own “here” is. This is just particularly difficult to write because it takes me back to a time in my life when I felt like an utter failure. Frankly, it sucks to think about it and it made it REALLY easy to put off writing. I know anybody would find it hard to think about a time like that, but I guess I have to make myself do the difficult thing in order to understand how I arrived where I am. So I will. Ugh. Bear with me.

I’ve already admitted that I’m overweight and that I need to make some serious changes in my life. What on earth could be more difficult to write about than something that personal? Well, try the last year that I lived in Chicago, when I felt like a complete failure because I wasn’t succeeding at work. I know, I know. I didn’t rob a bank, I didn’t mistreat a senior citizen, I didn’t kick a puppy, or anything like that. It happens to lots of people every day, so why was it so hard for me? I’m not sure, although I can tell you that I had never been a failure at work before that. Ever. I just made the mistake of letting my work become my life, instead of it being just one facet of my life. Admitting I felt like such a failure is much more embarrassing than admitting I’m overweight. Go figure (pun intended.)

I love Chicago– it’s such a beautiful city with so much to do (and SO many great restaurants, believe me, I know). By the time I left, though, I admit I was beaten down and pretty small (yes, I know, ironic since soon enough I would be feeling way too large). I worked for a large management consulting firm downtown, and for most of the time I was there, I loved it. Toward the end, though, things were pretty rough. The company had gone public, so everything changed drastically from the time I had started working there. Where there used to be a sense of camaraderie, there was competition, and I’m talking absolutely cutthroat stuff. One part of the company’s mission statement when I started was that they hired nice people. One day that sentence just sort of disappeared… funny how as much as they pushed their mission statement down our throats, that little disappearing act was never, ever discussed.

To give you a little bit of background, what mattered was billable hours and bringing in the cash. People used to be fairly generous about sharing projects, but the focus changed and everybody was hogging hours, and generally being really obnoxious about getting on the teams with the biggest budgets. I’m not a cutthroat kind of person–never have been, and I never will be. I didn’t have the heart for it, plus it was really hard to change gears and go from a cooperative work environment to a competitive one. I had always excelled at work, ALWAYS. It was hard to go from having autonomy and being told I was doing good work to feeling like everything, absolutely everything, I did was under microscopic scrutiny and that every little thing I did was constantly being judged by the nit pickiest people on the face of the earth. It felt like if I even breathed wrong, I heard about it. And that’s only a slight exaggeration! Pretty much everything I had done in the past was now wrong. I just didn’t have the enthusiasm I had previously had for the job because the job had changed while I hadn’t. I felt like nothing I did was right. I took criticism of my work as criticism of me, which I shouldn’t have. It’s hard to separate yourself from your work, I know. I try not to do that now and I can’t always do it, but back then I really couldn’t. I worked so many hours and put so much effort into the job that it WAS me. Criticism of my work was criticism of ME. I took everything too personally, and when my work came under fire, I believed that I as a person was under fire. I felt like an abused puppy, always waiting for the next blow to come.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of a support system to help me cope. My friend Lauri had left the company and I really missed her, and my sister’s family had moved to southern California. After a while I realized I felt completely alone in a city of 8 million people. Sure, I had friends, but we all lived so far apart all over the city and the suburbs. We all worked a lot of hours, and we all had to run for our own trains and buses when we could. It was also really hard in the winter– when it’s 20 degrees outside and the wind is howling off the lake, your inclination is to get home as fast as possible, hole up in your own apartment, and hibernate. Oh, alright, MY inclination was to get home as fast as possible and hibernate. There are certain crazy people out there (and you know who you are if you’re reading this) who are so devoted to running that they’re willing to run in the snow and ice. I, needless to say, was not one of those crazy people. Don’t get me wrong, though! I don’t mean to sound as if I couldn’t possibly have made more of an effort to get out and about with friends. I know I could have, but the long hours at work were starting to affect me and (unfortunately) my whole attitude toward life. All I was doing was working long hours, sleeping some, working long hours, sleeping some, repeat ad nauseam.

And speaking of nausea, it finally got to the point where I was sick to my stomach every morning as I got ready for work. Seriously sick to my stomach. The taste of toothpaste was enough to give me the dry heaves. I was having a physical reaction to having to go to that office every day! How sad is THAT! But even after months of throwing up every morning, I still didn’t get what was going on. I remember I went to see a doctor, and she looked at me and said “You’re not sick, I just think you hate your job.” Really? Wow. I never honestly thought of that. Stress? Sure. Bad days? Sure! But hate my job? Wait a minute… Holy crap, I hated my job, the job I once loved! So after having some sense knocked into me, I decided I wanted to be around my family and back home in Texas.

When I moved back, I did take some time off to rest, but pretty soon I had to go back to work. The goal of taking some time off was to try to rejuvenate and find the old enthusiasm I had lost, but I’m not sure what happened. I guess the last few months in Chicago affected me more than I was willing to admit.  Worse, I didn’t have the right attitude when I did go job hunting. Instead of being patient and waiting for the right job, I took the first job offered to me. I KNEW it wasn’t a good fit the second I arrived for my interview, but I brushed aside my gut feeling to do the safe, practical thing– have a paycheck coming in! I mean, how gutsy would it have been to turn down a job and stay unemployed for who knows how much longer? Pretty gutsy, and I wasn’t feeling gutsy at the time. Remember,  I was still feeling like a failure. I still remember that when I left the interview, if someone had asked me to describe the office, I would’ve said “gray.” Gray everything– I honestly remember the carpet as being gray, the cubicle partitions as gray, the receptionist was gray, the wall color being a pale shade of gray, etc. That right there should’ve been the first big clue, but noooooo, I accepted the job. What a surprise the first day was when I walked in– I must’ve been staring at everything around me trying to figure out where all the gray furniture and carpet went. As it turns out, what was primarily gray in that office was the people. They were dry, dull, unimaginative, humorless drones who didn’t want to do any more work than they were absolutely required to do, and who saved all of their energy for gossiping about each other and stabbing each other in the back. Oh, what an energy drainer! I lasted 6 months before I had to go find another job because I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I hate to admit it, but I did it AGAIN. I was so desperate to get away from the first place, I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Yep, right smack dab into the fire, and here I sit today.

To say that I threw myself into my current job is putting it mildly. I was desperate just to prove that I was a good employee. I worked steady 12 hours days, I worked weekends, I worked holidays. I think after the last year of the job in Chicago, I needed to have someone say “you ARE doing a good job.” Unfortunately, the praise and recognition never came. You know what did? The feeling of being a failure, and this time around, POUNDS came along, too. The pounds came because I told myself that I didn’t have time to eat right, that I couldn’t leave my desk to take a lunch break (had to prove my dedication, of course!), and I SURE didn’t have time to work out, because I was at work at all hours from early morning to late at night. The problem is, I never got ahead of all the work and I never will.

It finally hit me about a year ago that nothing is going to change. It’s really not, not ever. I know that rationally, I shouldn’t feel like a failure again because I’ve tried, I really have, but management is not going to get me any more help, and a tough situation is only going to get worse. As it is, that really hit home this last week when we discovered that the wrong information for someone was entered into the payroll system, and the paperwork with the correct info wasn’t in the employee’s file. I didn’t make the mistake, but it’s my responsibility because I didn’t find the mistake and correct it. It kills me, believe me, because even though I want to get another job, I still take a lot of pride in my work and it pisses me off that I didn’t find the error.

(As an aside, though, this last week taught me something else. It taught me that I shouldn’t keep things internalized and that it’s healthier in the long run to just be honest about things, even if it’s embarrassing. The truth really shall set you free, I suppose. I hadn’t said a word about the situation to anyone even though I had chance after chance. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it because I felt like such an idiot. After keeping it to myself for the better part of a week, a couple of days ago the stress was so bad that I finally ended up just sort of blurting it out to someone who was probably a little taken aback at hearing about it out of the blue, but who (thankfully) listened to me and was honest but reassuring about it. Saying it out loud took away some of the power, I guess. It made it easier to talk to my sister and a couple of friends about it, and nobody’s tried to make me feel like a failure yet. I still feel like an idiot, though.)

So I realized probably a year ago that there wasn’t going to be any fundamental change in the way the company does business, and that I needed to find another job. But I also knew that I didn’t want to interview looking the way I did. I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable, much less confident, interviewing at the size I was.  I’ve known that much for a while, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that I really thought about it and realized something much more important. I had sacrificed my health trying to get something I just wasn’t ever going to get from an external source. It seems so clear now, but no manager, or review, or job was (or is) going to make me feel better about myself. I have to make myself feel better about myself (if that makes any sense whatsoever, but you know what I mean). I wasn’t going to be able to do that, though, unless I started to lose some weight and take back my life. Accepting this (very wrong) job is completely my responsibility. I didn’t ask enough questions about what the job actually entailed, I didn’t ask about staffing and support, and after I was offered the job I sure didn’t ask enough questions about performance reviews and salary increases. That was one mistake I will never, ever, make again, believe me.

 So back in May when I started thinking about what I want, a new job was at the top of the list. I want to enjoy going to work again. I don’t want it to be the center of my life, but I don’t want to feel constant stress about it, either. I want to LIKE my job. SO, the resume rewrite has started. Granted, it’s not finished, because there’s this blog thing I have to write, and my workouts have to remain a priority, and then there’s work. There’s always lots and lots of work. And then more work on top of that. But it will be done soon, and I’ll start looking for another job shortly.

Of course I have no idea how long it’ll take to find another job, but I do know that taking control of the situation has done a lot for my self-confidence. This time I’ll make sure to take time, ask a lot of questions, and in general make sure the job is a good fit for me. I will NOT force myself to fit the job.  So wish me luck on the great job hunt. And by the way, anybody want to be a reference for me?

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