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.