“By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”
— Robert Frost.
I got a new job at a warehouse, just for the month of December to make a little extra cash. I was really anxious to start. I have my set routine that I really like and new things in my schedule really throw me for a loop. But I still say yes to new opportunities because usually they turn out okay after I get adjusted to the change. Change is hard, I have my set schedule that works and get me where I need to go, and new things shift the timing and energy levels for the old things. With adding this new job I started skipping outings with friends and being late to work and missing runs in my training plan. Sometimes it takes hours and sometimes it takes months to adjust, with this job luckily it only took two weeks for my life to feel settled again. The job itself is not so bad, I get to listen to podcasts all day and not talk to anyone, and the pay is pretty good. It took me a little while to find my niche there though. I’m really intelligent, I swear, but I was making mistakes that even a third grader would find ridiculous. My first task was checking the sizes of the garments coming in the shipments against the standard sizes to make sure they were accurate. I would check the size and give it a thumbs up or down on sizing, but by the time I had repackaged it often I could not for the life of me remember whether it was good to go or not. Sometimes I would have to unpack, check, and repack the same garment three times in a row. Needless to say, I was slow as heck. So they moved me to inventory, but no matter how hard I tried, I made really really dumb mistakes checking two hundred clearly labeled boxes off a list. After these first two failures I felt really really bad. How could I, someone in their mid twenties with a college degree, be making these really basic errors even though I’m trying my hardest. But then they moved me to Returns, where I inspected the quality of a garment and then folded and packaged it nicely before re-shelving it. This is where I found my roll. I was twice as fast and just as accurate as the others at this job, I got my redemption on those two other tasks. I can use my ability to zone out to my advantage in Returns, because I don’t have to count or sort so I can turn on a podcast and be transported to another world. All of a sudden I snap to reality and it’s been four hours and there are piles of neatly folded garments around me. I feel like I’ve been transported in time.
My current, longer term job was hell at first until I figured out the rules and optimized the perfect dosages of caffeine and food. If I feel dizzy I eat a snack and if I get anxious/overwhelmed/brain fog I drink my tea. Now my job is just tolerable. I almost quit four different times in the first month, I was exhausted with day after day of constant failure. Luckily I had several excellent side-kicks to talk me off the ledge, after the three month mark at the job things started to stabilize and even start improving. I hate learning by trial and error, it seems crazy to me that anyone can learn that way, by just being thrown into the mix. You try your very best and then people tell you what you’re doing is wrong over and over. I tried working at a preschool once, and got in trouble so many times, for breaking all these rules I didn’t know, that I quit after a week. At this current job, to succeed, I have to turn off all my feelings and all my autonomy, I’m reduced to a typing robot. My boss is always right, even when she’s wrong, and I am often blamed for things I didn’t do. The only thing that keeps me there is that it’s a really good learning opportunity. But it’s hard to sum up the energy to pretend to care about my coworker’s granddaughters or the art class they’re taking when I have to turn off all my caring about anything just to get my job done with the least mistakes. I can’t just turn on my feelings midday for thirty minutes at lunch time and then turn them back off. I know maybe 10/50 of people’s names and I work there 25 hours a week with all of them.
My therapist told me to work on making more connections with people, it’ll be to my advantage in my career. So I’m trying to work on saying yes and engaging.
Metaphysical Blender 