Career obsession and health

 I'm sure we have all heard it all before. Work life balance is the term for it but at the root of it, all of us want to be fulfilled in our personal lives, our interests, our families and our careers. 

In my case, I have done what I can regarding self care and self reflection. My career woes go down several years, and while it's been mostly positive in terms of how interesting I find my job and the money earned, there have been some issues that have been front and center for me for years.

Enter health anxiety and worries for mine and my families' health. All of the work stuff fades in comparison. But every time I take a mental break from the health anxiety, the work anxiety says "hello!". 

I've now to find a good strategy to keep both of them at bay, or at least to manage them. So it's time to list the positives and negatives I suppose, and hope that brings me a balanced perspective. I do not want to fly off the handle about my job or remain career obsessed, even though I am pretty ambitious.

Negatives:

- I came in to this job at the wrong job title. It is usually for those early in career, and this means that I have some climbing to do. 

- Of course, the responsibilities are still being assigned based on my experience which is mid-senior level.

- This causes frustration and is something I'm not able to shake off. I hate, I repeat, absolutely hate, working for that elusive promotion. Been there, done that for the past 9ish years - moving goalposts, discrimination, reorgs, and more - I can just list a long list of reasons why that can happen again.

- The workload I'm assigned seems to be unfairly distributed (in my opinion). I'm the newbie, that gets the leftover features, the problematic features and somehow even the bulk of the features while being assigned a "junior" position, and somehow I'm supposed to be motivated to prove myself - I wanted that promotion right?

- I'm still salty about the fact that I had a bait and switch done on me - and that this promotion was actually not supposed to be in the picture. I actually was down-leveled at hire and therefore was reset a couple of years probably.

Positives

Okay so that seemed pretty bad but it was good to get it off my chest. Here are the positives:

- Got a new job, without much of a break. Got a severance package that still has a few months to go. So I get double salary for a few.

- My pay is almost a time and a half more than my last job.

- New company, leader in its field, new technology - all exciting stuff

- New role, which really opens up many many doors for me

- Down to earth colleagues - such a change from the toxic arrogant environment I was working in

- Opportunities to work on stuff I'm interested in and stepping stone for better roles

- Very well respected company and combined with my past experience, my resume is absolutely powerful.

- I still have another job lead for a company I wanted to work for that is putting my application on hold. I've already interviewed there and gotten through 3 rounds. So it's a matter of resuming the process if and when I'm ready - so I already have my next gig lined up.

- Some really nice people I get to work with.

- Manager is friendly, supportive and down to earth. Such a change from the very arrogant and sneaky past experience.

Alright, I should not think too much and go with the flow. Learn as much as possible, enjoy it while I can and enjoy my family when I can as well. We also have a new nanny so we can finally focus again and hope that this new dynamic works for our family and for her.

Back to health and family - keep doing things to keep those in good shape. 

Signing off. 

Marching on

It's been a busy time here at home. We're working, taking care of kids, mental health is shot with no rest. We realized how deep into it we were when after several difficult nights of toddler not sleeping well, we had one night that he slept until 6 and we woke up feeling like brand new people.

Anyway, it appears that our kids are going through some big feelings around life. They miss their nanny, seeing family and friends, their grandpa, and are worried about their other grandparents, as well as us. We had tinnitus flare ups that got us down and upset our kids. My husband and I are worriers by nature and over-thinkers about our life, work, etc. And I think this stress sort of rubs off on the kids.

Anyway, after years of beating ourselves up about our work style - I feel that screw it. It's unique, it's good to care, it's a positive quality to want to be as detailed as possible in our work, and to be cooperative rather than manipulative/aggressive. Unfortunately this sometimes doesn't serve us well in our competitive and cut throat careers, but that's a balance we will need to find. But maybe we can try and find it without changing who we fundamentally are? Wishful or naive thinking or realistic goal? There's still room to grow and things to learn about work personalities. 

It's a bit hard to wrap our minds around the Covid situation. Vaccinations are going on, and things are opening up. But the situation is still pretty bad the world over? Some people are just done and going on as if nothing happened. Others like us are so isolated, we feel like we live on a different planet compared to some others. And so much is up in the air still with all the variants going around and unknowns about vaccines, as well as how to get the pandemic under control.

My work is a mixed bag. I'm realizing I have been extremely fortunate to get this job and that it could be quite empowering if I am able to do it well. But I also get these frequent feelings of being undervalued, and I am not sure how much of it is valid to be frank. I've been battered and bruised, but on the other hand I can recognize the signs well? I want to trust my instincts more and second guess myself less and see how it serves me.

This month will bring a new nanny and my birthday... trying to look forward to things, but really we are just so tired. Maybe when our kid finally sleeps well, is when we can rest. Our ped suggested a sleep consultant and we can probably look into that. I am pretty sure that I can go back to journal entries as far as five years back and find "I hope our sleep issues improve" about the kids. It's been what now, five, six years? Oof! 

I've fallen off the shoegaze wagon, for some reason. After all the events of the past few months, I no longer have favorites that are stuck in my mind. Maybe that's why I also feel quite blah. But as I write this, and think about how much we've achieved and overcome, maybe that's something to feel thankful and satisfied about. With that, let's roll into the weekend.