When I find myself mired in indecision which is often the case, I look for signs. My job had been making me miserable for about a year, it was like a bad boyfriend.
First he made me so happy, I fell in love and we spent the best part of our lives together, then slowly but surely he began to bore me and frustrate me and the thought of our beautiful wedding glimmering in the future suddenly brought me out in a rash.
You know that clever way that bad boyfriends have of sensing when you’ve just had enough and they buy you flowers or whisper about a trip to Paris in your ear until you think everything might turn out well after all?
My employers used the same tactics, each time I thought I really can’t do another day rotting my brain like this they would put the carrot in front of my nose: pay rise, promise of promotion and finally the actual promotion.
Now you might think I’m sounding a bit ungrateful here but the carrot would only come out when you were down to your last chips and in the depths of despair. The rest of the time, there was no carrot, to say the least.
One morning I picked up a magazine with the front cover featuring on article on why it’s not always a bad thing to quit your job. I ran into the French restaurant where I was meeting my boyfriend for dinner gleefully gripping the magazine in my head and read the article aloud to him over our starters. It was a sign!
The next week I picked up a magazine that had an article on how unemployment rates amongst young people and women, both of which categories I fall into, are the highest they’ve been in years, I read the accompanying tips on how to rejuvenate the love for your job with a grim face.
This time I chose not to read it as a sign though, proving that I was only looking for signs to validate a choice I had already made. Which meant, hurrah! I had made the decision. Now how to go about it? Thinking you have made the decision and actually making the decision, I was to discover, are two very different things.
In the months that followed I came close to destroying my relationship with my partner, used my mother as an unpaid dial-a-therapist for a few hours a night and frustrated virtually everyone I spoke to including chatty cabbies. The conversation would go a bit like this:
Me: ‘I hate my job for X,Y, Z. It’s making me so miserable‘ (tears are normally de rigeur at this part)
Other person: ‘well then I agree that you should leave and you have a good plan for what to do next so when are you going to do something about it?‘
Me: (backtracking) ‘well actually sometimes they’re good to me, they have promised X,Y and Z, sometimes I think I still love them‘ (We are getting back to the bad boyfriend analogy here…)
At the end of the day it all came down to fear. And fear is really not to be underestimated. Fear of not being paid at the end of every month, fear of making the wrong decision, fear that you won’t get another job or in my case that my own business will never get off the ground. Fear that if I’m not in work everyday for 12 hours I will actually morph into a lazy slob that sleeps until noon and sits around the house eating Nik Naks and watching Friends reruns. Fear that working from home will turn me into a hermit, unable to participate in normal social interactions. Fear of turning into one of those old ladies that stop people in the street to ask questions they don’t need an answer to just because they haven’t spoken to anyone in three weeks. Having disregarded my personal life for my work for so many years, are any of my friends actually still talking to me after all the cancelled dinners and drinks?
My boyfriend who apparently feels no fear, or at least has little empathy for this emotion, set me a very good challenge. One night, when he’d reached his wits end, he said ‘ok if you won’t decide now then you have to set a date when you will make the decision, one way or another but until that day you can’t keep deliberating it‘.
I agreed, partly to pacify him, little did I know he was playing a clever game, I decided on the 26th November since that’s my birthday and therefore the only significant date I could think of when put on the spot to choose a day.
The next day I went into work, had a typical day i.e. wanted to climb out of the window and realised I now couldn’t quit until the 26th November and then add on a working a months notice which takes you up until Christmas. Only then when the choice was taken away from me did I realise I couldn’t stand another day so I thought fuck it and resigned.
Comments
Annelie
Well done!! Good for you 🙂
Natalie
Love the bad boyfriend analogy. Pesky men. Pesky jobs.
Tilly
Still in the bad boyfriend stage personally, but a great inspiration for when I’m “ready to break up”.
Natalie
Maybe we should add this to the ‘how-to’ section for future reference? 😉