I’m going through one of those periodic phases where I feel like a weirdo/loser for wanting, even needing, more than ever, continued continuity not change in my job. I don’t just mean the actual employer (with whom I want to be a ‘lifer’ until retirement, if spared) but the exact same post, grade, job title, non-managerial type of responsibilities etc.
In my specific case I work in a university library, have done for 21 years, and have remained in the lower pay range/job grade for all of that time. I know that additional responsibilities in a higher post would make me miserable, burn me out, and gave me feeling totally out of my depth and dreading going into work. Whereas what I have been doing, and want to continue with, is something akin to cataloguing primarily (record checking, metadata finessing, document uploads), but with occasional front of house duties of a more traditional hands-on nature: answering queries, helping find and issue books etc. which I love and feel like I won the job lottery to be doing (more than that it’s literally one of about two or three things I could do long term and full time without a breakdown).
A few years ago a sequence of events brought me to a bad mental state and I freaked out about status anxiety, was I a joke and a loser etc. while others sought to climb the ladder into the scarce few managerial roles that were coming up, and, if having failed to do so in some cases jumping shop to other careers. That kind of prideful yet cavalier jumping about scares the hell out of me (how on earth do others do it with ease? How can they not value the hard won comfort of an established fixed constant role? How can radical change an constant new horizons not make them feel ill with worry?) And then I start wondering if there something deeply wrong in me that I can’t begin to want to be like that. Before concluding that even if I am rare or anomalous in wanting the same exact things week in week out, it’s how I cope, in a world of too much uncertainty and overwhelm already. So, even if I end up being the Ken Barlow of my workplace while all else come and go around me, I know that’s something I’ll live with. I just wish there were more who felt like me. Even the few fellow travellers who started around the same time as me, and didn’t ascend to (overrated) ‘greatness’ or just arbitrarily switch jobs/career sometimes hint that they’re restless, dream of moving on, leaving the library service or university entirely. Some poorly thought through Changes to the service haven’t helped - morale in offices through most of the building I’d at an all time low due to corporate-style tinkering in a realm that is ill suited to that type of upheaval. It has made even the ones I’d hoped would be there to their or my retirement feel like less of a cert than once they did. So I’m freaking out a bit. I know it will pass, and I know that typing this is already exorcising some of the more intense anxiety about it all just by dint of getting it outside my head and onto the ‘page’.
And yet… I know I’d feel comforted by hearing from anyone on here whose personal autistic wiring, not dissimilarly to my own, has kept them in one workplace, one post, one set of largely unchanging duties. Perhaps declining the path of ‘advancement’ when others have tried to (well meaningly? Sometimes I wonder) nudge them along it, because they know they need exactly what they have and no more. Is there anyone who’s exceeded my twenty one year (so far) stint in my one job type and grade, and do they likewise feel it’s what they need and defensive about that being as valid a life as the more orthodox slippery pole etc? I just want to feel like I’m ok as I am I suppose. Not some kind of freak. I know I’m breaking no laws by wanting the exact routines and tasks I have, this year, next year, and until the day I retire (if I live that long). That’s ok… isn’t it? But if so… why does everyone else have to be so restless and trying to prescribe the same for me? I just want peace. Security. Predictability. I mean no harm.
Thanks for reading this far if you gave, and I hope I don’t sound like an utter loser.
