Published on 12, July, 2020
Sorry - I wasn't going to come here and bother you good people again. But the truth is, I've got nowhere else to go where there might be people who will understand.
I start my new job tomorrow. And I'm scared. Not just the usual night-before jitters that I always get before starting a new job. No - really scared. It's eight weeks now since I was last at my old job, as many of you will know. I went sick that day with a horrible anxiety attack - and I didn't go back. I worked my ticket. While I was off, I had my interview for this new job, and got it. It was such a relief just to give notice and know that at least I didn't have to face that woman again. For all of that, though, the job was perfect for me in so many other ways. The part-time hours were right, the pay was enough. It fit the bill. And it just seemed to drop in my lap right when I most needed it, after my time caring for mum, then the months of coming to terms with her passing. I felt blessed. But it went wrong, and that's all there is to it. And so to now.
The new job will be more demanding in a lot of ways. It's a far bigger organisation, it's full-time hours again (albeit term-time only, so longer holidays), and there's a huge amount to learn. They've already got me on the online courses, and there's over thirty of them - many of them long courses. I hate online learning, too. It doesn't work for me. But there it is.
That's incidental, though. The main thing is... this time off has made me realise just how exhausted I was. How much I needed a break. Since Christmas, when I stopped drinking and started to sleep better, I've been managing 10 hours a night, then still feeling the need for afternoon naps. And by nine in the evening, I'm exhausted again. Through doing very little except keep house, do shopping, read and watch films. I know 'doing nothng' can be tiring. But it's more than that. It's as if I've finally been catching up with what I need. And now it's all going to change again - and change up, too.
I know I have a tendency to think the worst, and it's all unknown... and that, by the end of the week, I may feel a lot better. But the thing I really feel is... it has to work this time. This is the last time. I'm sixty in May. Just a number, but it feels significant. Maybe I've made a mistake in changing jobs so quickly, not giving myself proper time. But I panicked. And I just felt it was what I had to do.
If this doesn't work out, if it proves too much, if it's too soon... I'll burn out. I think that may be actually what I'm experiencing already, with all the sleeping and exhaustion. These last 3 years have been some of my most challenging. The end of a damaging relationship and the fallout from that. Then mum's illness and death. Then the problems in my last job, and what that led to.
I just hope this is the right thing I'm doing. I hope.
But scared is what I am.
I'm feeling quite bleak at the moment. As low as I've felt for ages. I suppose it's quite natural, given the circumstances.
My head is just chaos. I've tried to slow it with meditation, but nothing works. Sleep works - when it comes. But I'm having some vivid dreams, mostly connected in some way to mum and dad.
I really don't know what I want. Part of me wants to just pull myself together and face up to this job, ask for reasonable adjustments, ask for time to complete the training they want me to do, ask if I can do it under my own steam. One of the other workers on my section said that I could always apply for part-time, too, so maybe I could also look at reducing my days eventually (which would mean some kind of benefit top-up). Or go with this other job if I get offered it: local, familiar, known territory.
And another part of me is asking if I'm really ready for any of this just now. I feel like shutting down and hiding. Closing out the world. Hibernating. I find myself craving sleep all the time, just for that temporary absence from it all. Do I really want to be taking all this on at my age?
I'd just like something simple. A job I can go to, do my job, finish and go home. Like I had before it all went wrong. I don't want the complications. I do want to be able to work for a living, and be independent. But I need it to be on my terms.
Doesn't everyone want that, though...
You seem to be very concerned about the training. Why? What's the worse that can happen? Will they fire you if you don't complete it successfully?
The GCSE maths should be a walk in the park for any adult. And the rest, just take it a day at a time.
Not so much that, Robert, as being hit with a lot of stuff at once - a fair bit of it unexpected. Some prior knowledge that I would need to take these qualifications would have been useful - say, at offer stage. You don't expect to be told it all in your contract. It was never made clear. Couple that with the fact that I was quite back to full recovery (I thought I was, but everything hit me like a train). It's taken me a few days to actually begin to take it all in and rationalise it a bit more. I'll speak to HR again on Monday and see what they have to say.
I suppose they're at least being upfront and thorough about the training, unlike the experience you had.
Robert124 said:GCSE maths should be a walk in the park for any adult.
Really? I'm sure I'll manage it. But I think that's a pretty broad assessment. I've looked at elements of GCSE Maths before and found it pretty challenging - not having much of a mathematical brain.
I can't really remember now. It was something to do with having to exchange numbers for symbols. I was okay with very basic stuff. If x + 10 = 12, x = 2. But when it started to get more complex, up into quadratic equations, I simply lost it and zoned out. I didn't want to know. But then, I was the same at school with most things. School was really a waste of time for me. I could read, write and count before I started. By the time I left, 11 years later, I could read, write and count better. That was about it. Everything else passed me by. I really, honestly didn't realise how ignorant I was - how very little I knew about just about everything: history, geography, the sciences - until I got to university at 28. It must have seemed to my much-younger peers as if I'd crawled out of a cave. I remember walking into a seminar room one day and seeing all these lines and numbers and symbols on the board and saying to another student 'What on earth is all that?' She looked at it... and started to read through it. 'Fairly basic calculus formulae. Stuff you do in A level maths.' It was all I needed to know. I thought it was truly remarkable that someone so young could make sense of it!
And there I was, with a Mensa IQ...
Martian Tom said: I tried and tried with algebra, but anything beyond the very basics would not sink in
If you don't mind me asking what did you find difficult with algebra? (I'm sincerely interested in this). That's a common point where people fall off the train. Another early one is fractions. The combination of algebra and fractions often being the killer.
My income will be steady, or steadily growing, and predictable, because I will intend it to be so from the start.
I won’t accept anything less than £60 an hour, and that’s the starting pay and I will have at least one stream of passive income from the off.
I’ll be offering 15 hour courses on self esteem, which is an introduction to metaphysics. The course will be £180 per person, for the in person course and I haven’t thought about a price for the same online version yet.
I’ll be offering one to one metaphysical counselling sessions, in 3 formats. Face to face, online and via some kind of email service.
I’ll also be offering spiritual treatments. For one off specific problems, such as irritation, anger or loss etc as well as more detailed and individualised treatments.
And as my first passive stream of income, I’ll have a page on my website, as an amazon affiliate, for all the books I’ve read, and read, that have helped me to attain and maintain my current state of peace and happiness. Over time, I’ll write reviews for each of these books to help people make more informed choices.
These are just my beginning plans, and they’re more than enough for starters. I’ll deal with the rest, as I come to them.
As a strategy, I simply found what I was uniquely positioned to do, what I loved to do, what made me feel alive inside and excited, and I took it from there. Finding out what I loved to do etc was the hard part. It’s taken me almost six years to find out. With lots of ups and downs. But I decided that I wasn’t going to live if I couldn’t get off the hamster wheel that I seemed to be on and I was not going to compromise on that, not ever.
It seemed like no matter what I achieved, how well I did, or what I did, I would only ever get so far and it would all come crashing down and none of it ever felt real.
A lot of this was explained by the diagnosis. But I found out a lot, by self examination, pre diagnosis and post.
But I made the decision, that I was going to live my life, exactly to my liking, or not at all and I was not willing to compromise.
So the pay off is amazing, but I paid a high price. I gave my whole life, I laid it on the line, but in doing so, I found life.