trustno1

A little belated but here it goes:

On the fourth it was one year that I was "let go" from the company I worked at and still remain forever grateful. It wasn't the worst job I'd ever had - that's not it at all - and it wasn't the best job ever - pretty building, pretty people but still a job just like any other: no better, no worse. What this job was was a mirror of all the jobs before it and the road I had paved for myself: a stress filled, neurotic avenue that only left space for working, the minimal household chores and sleeping.

This wasn't what I had pictured when I started my studies. When I was in school I always pictured my job as being useful in the transition from being a newbie to being fully integrated into the work space, that's why I liked training, and the part about dissecting and trying to explain step by step how stuff works is the kind of thing I really love to do. But time and time again I was confronted by reality, companies don't care too much for training, it takes time out what is considered "production" and they'd rather have people working and trying to learn at the same time (even though this makes a lot of people leave soon and just making the recruiting thing an unending mess not to mention you are always giving the same basic training course over and over again); and then there are the productivity and government compliance reports, everybody wants to look good but nobody really cares about them being real.

And behavior in the workplace is not much better, aside from the backstabbing the leadership always leaves much to be desired, it's like bosses think that by telling you that your job is at stake if you don't keep the numbers up (even though you don't have the power to make that happen) you'll be stimulated to "do much better" and for what just so they can go to their meetings and show what a great job THEY are doing.

I seriously felt like I was inside a pool (btw can't swim) standing on my tip-toe's with water up to my neck and my bosses looking at me and just saying "I think it needs more water, yeah more water we can still put more water in there". Every time it just felt like the more work I did the more work that would be thrown my way and I couldn't say no 'cause that would just be unprofessional and nobody in their right mind would ever do that.

It's like I realized all the commonalities that there are in every workplace and I didn't like it. I just started to realize how completely invested I was on working and how much of my self-worth had to do with how work was going. Fortunately this time I was smart enough to see the common thread: corporate life ain't for me and when I assumed this and admitted I wanted out I was given an out that has let me be job free - stress free for a whole year!

I haven't done anything world changing in this year but I have been able to just relax and sort of "retrain my brain" to realize that not every single thing is my responsibility and that being no.1 at everything is not what makes me a worthy human.

This year I've been reading, writing my journal, cooking, exercising, a couple of crafts and generally focusing on me -  someone I hadn't put much attention on in a while.