I don’t want to say “I realized”, because that implies that I’m right about it. I don’t know that I am, so I say “I suspect”, and that seems too little. The idea came to me out of the blue, this morning at about 4 AM. First that I’ve gotten really good at talking my subconscious mind into dealing with things that I don’t want to. Take enough pills to sleep, subconscious kicks in and goes to work. It’s a very delicate balance, because if I tick it off I get nightmares, or in the case of this morning waking up into a panic.
The other thing is that I’m looking at this working for a living thing all wrong. This last implosion made that clear to me; I have different ideas about my value than appear in my work and those who work with me. One of the really hard things is that I don’t know if I’ve lost the job. I refuse to listen to voicemail or take calls about it, because employers can say some of the worst things imaginable when it is just you and them. If they do that in writing, it constitutes a hostile work environment and you can take them to court over it. So I’ve narrowed their access to me to be only in writing.
Apart from this current unpleasantness; I had this kind of shift in thinking once before. I really didn’t want to ever have to do anything like it again. It was when my first wife left me. I realized I had been approaching romantic relationships entirely wrong, and as a result I ripped apart my personality, changed everything about my approach, and the story has a happy ending because I met my wife and we are as happy as two frustrated and poor people have any right to be.
The wonderful thing about romance, is how non-essential it is. I was able to take two years and really do whatever I felt necessary to remove behaviors on my part that gave women in my life the feeling that it was okay to say or do things that caused me great distress. Doing that with work, in the culture I live in anyway, is going to be hard.
I think that considering how I might go about it is the first step. Where to from here I’m not sure.
I don’t think I deserve this, and I don’t think that the future version of myself deserves my negligence on this issue. I have the right to a job where I am not terrified to come to work. I have a right to a job that doesn’t make me choose between it and family. I have a right to a job that doesn’t come at the expense of my health.
I really don’t care what the job is anymore, just that it pays enough and allows me ample time off. All else is window dressing, because the thing that needs to change is what I put up with, and what I attract.
1 comment
A lot of people who are very unhappy at work leave office jobs to do something completely different. In the UK at least you can be paid more as a street sweeper than you can be as a manager in a stressful office. I once knew someone who made the shift, though lower in ‘status’ by picking up litter all day he was physically fitter and most people acted like he was invisible and didn’t bother him. Zero stress, more money, better health.