Catching up

[jethrien]

So obviously, I kind of fell off the habit of posting. It’s been a weirdly hard year, in which things were objectively better than the last two, but my mental health was not. Combination I think of delayed trauma from 2020 and 2021, and my job pretty much sucking.

So about the job. I’m not going to go into many details, but I’ve been generally unimpressed both by the product and by the strategic direction. From the marketing perspective, there’s been a ton of deck chair shuffling as the ship goes down, in which we never got to any of the stuff I thought would actually make a difference because we had to endlessly redo the parts we’d already done. They finally aligned with what I’d told them they should do back when I started in April 2021 some time around mid summer. But that meant we’d spent a very long time not actually closing deals. We did start actually spending the time and resources on the things I thought we should have been focusing on in August. But we’ve had two rounds of layoffs already because we’re running out of runway. I had to lay off some of my team, which means I then had to absorb their roles. It has sucked, in more ways than I want to detail here.

Anyway, I’m hitting the point of serious burnout. (You’re not supposed to spend at least an hour or two a week on the floor under a weighted blanket sobbing, right?) Like, the emotional responses are disproportionate and I can tell that, but apparently I spent the last three years not dealing with the burnout that had sent me into a tailspin right before lockdown, and then continued shoving all those shitty feelings over the last couple years into a deep dark well that is now full and overflowing randomly. Regular panic attacks, often without discernible triggers, so I’m just getting used to the feelings of lightheaded dissociation and hyperventilating. Fun! And it really sucks in that I can tell that the thing I’m currently panicking about isn’t actually worth doing so, and I can be irritated at my own overdramaticness, and it doesn’t actually help beyond making me feel guilty. But my body’s just DONE and doesn’t actually give a shit about my relative good fortune in the world.

So long story short, I quit.

Only it didn’t actually stick.

Thing is, I’m really good at my job. I’m deeply involved in all the aspects of marketing at the company, and am probably the only person who can do at least a shitty version of all of them. I’m definitely the only person left who has a clue how to make the automation and reporting work. And I’m the one who can actually write without an extremely detailed brief, and brief the freelancers so they turn out something that makes sense. So they were pretty desperate to keep me. And I honestly don’t give a shit about the money anymore.

So what I ended up with was two weeks of paid leave, and then I’m going back at 50% time in December. And we’ll see where we are after that. I don’t personally foresee going back full time for these folks except MAYBE if there’s an exit within a month or two and they need the help to close things out in a way that makes my options worth anything. But that will give me some decompression time and then some time to actually handle all the book-related stuff and properly hunt for something not shitty.

But in the meantime, I had sudden unexpected time off. So I went to Barcelona!

Comments

[vshnayder]

oof. Sounds rough, but 50% time may actually be a good compromise. Let us know how it goes! I got an unasked-for promotion recently because my grand-boss got promoted, so now I have a bigger team to manage. Good officially, but not helpful for stress levels...