This last few years have been less than ideal. And before I start my little ranting post I want to preface with my Perspective Acknowledgement – Yes, I get it. I’m lucky in a lot of ways. I am healthy, I am able bodied, I have many luxuries and securities that so many people don’t. I know this. But knowing this doesn’t make my yuck go away. I can’t “Perspective” to death my own life discontent. Yes, I have it good. And so do you in some way, shape or form. But it doesn’t mean we can’t hope and dream for more. Or begrudge the crap that makes things bad. Moaning will commence in five seconds.
Okay, perspective check done.
four…
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two…
one….
You’re still here? Okay, then you asked for it.
I just need to write for a moment, to let out some feelings and some anxieties so they can make their way out of my brain and somewhere else. I left a job almost exactly a year ago, that I very much loved for most of seven years. With people I very much loved. That last year something happened. My job got into a serious car accident and sustained a closed head injury. From the outside my job looked very much the same, but it became anxious, agitated, paranoid and quick to lash out. I watch my job become something I didn’t know, something that drained me and left me feeling broken at the end of the day.
I tried to minimize the things that happened at my job, I made excuses for it and rationalized that it was just feeling a lot of pressure. But then the people in my life, the ones who cared about me, asked me “Jacque, what is wrong with you that you think it’s okay to stay somewhere that makes you feel so bad?” And I realized that the job I loved wasn’t the same job anymore. That job was gone. When it left, the love I thought it had for me left too. If it was ever there at all. So regardless of how much I still thought I loved my job, it was an unhealthy one.
So I broke up with my job. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. I got violently, physically ill the day I gave notice-my body purging all the yuck that had built up over the last year I’d spent coping. Job, of course, was passive aggressive about it. At that point I just needed to get things in order and I wasn’t up for playing any games. I knew at that point job didn’t want me any more than I wanted to stay. Sometimes I wonder if job made up the entire car accident just to drive me away. But I’ll never know.
My last day, I didn’t say goodbye to some of the people there, and hugged some others. And I left to be with a new job elsewhere. New job was cuter anyway.
But old job followed, like an ex-boyfriend stuck so deep in my veins that the only way out would be for a full body blood transfusion. I was pathetic. I would wonder what was ex-job doing and if ex-job missed me. I’d dream about ex-job and would wake up angry, anxious and mad at myself. It was just a job after all, right?
I buried myself in my new work, out of requirement more than necessity. It took up a lot of my time and the stress of new job, something I hadn’t anticipated, reared an ugly head the moment I stepped through the door. It was a many headed hydra that, to this day, continues to grow heads. I found myself longing for the days of pancake Fridays and bathroom shenanigans. The dreams about ex-job became more frequent. I knew, in my head, I was romanticizing ex job because my new job proved to be a whole different strange monster I wasn’t prepared to deal with. I cried. New job was supposed to have been perfect job. I just didn’t understand how things could have become so warped. I became a person that was told “You need to smile more.” ME!? ME??!! A person that had, at one time, been asked to be a happiness consultant?
It has been almost a year with New job and we have had our differences, we’ve grown to appreciate each other and have fallen into a comfortable existence. But it was not an easy process.
And old job, well last night I had a dream that I was back working there again, super uncomfortable and unhappy. I suppose it was better than my dream that I hadn’t memorized the lines to the company play-that one was worse. But it still shows me how much old job is still polluting my ground water…
Jacqueverse 