User blog:Darks Lanfear/The Balancing Act of Life

As everyone should know, life is a giant balancing act. People have to figure out how much sleep they need to function, how much free time they have to have for sanity, how much work they have to do to survive, so on and so forth. Every person is unique, and sees the events that happen in life differently, and so need different events to occur or different structure based on how they have perceived the events in their life. This is one of the beautiful aspects of life – the different way people can see the same event, and how they structure their lives around it.

For the last 4 years I have been working full time, going to school full time, and trying to have a life as well. In March, I quit my job of 4 years because not only was there no way to advance, but the manager that had been put in place had already decided I was a liability and was pushing for every little thing to get me fired. It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t even drive myself to work anymore because I would start having panic attacks about whether or not the manager would be there with some other way to write me up. Now, I’m not saying I’m perfect by any means, but when the only time I see a manager is when they are there to tell me they found one more black mark on the way to getting me fired, it can make a person paranoid. I worked hard, did everything by the books, helped out and supported my team, who at the time didn’t have any direct leadership available when they were working because the manager had fired the team leads as well, and still assisted my customers. The manager wrote me up for always missing work in January, with the reason being “it’s a pattern and therefore is a fireable offense” despite the fact the only reason I ever missed work was because the roads were too treacherous for me to drive the hour into work in the snow. What’s worse is that I told the manager when they were first transferred into the department that I lived an hour away from work, and winter was always hard for me because half the roads I have to drive on aren’t plowed, and my little Saturn station wagon is so little and low to the ground that I risk getting stuck or blown right off the road if there’s enough wind. At the time, the manager was understanding and said it wouldn’t be a problem, and then the first time I had to call in because of it I was written up. When the manager came in on the last day I was working, I knew without a doubt I was going to be written up for something. Sure enough, there was a call that was found where our styles of handling issues clashed, and because I did not agree with how they said I should have acted, I was written up again. At that moment I decided enough was enough, I couldn’t handle the stress anymore, and I walked. It actually seemed to make the manager angry that I quit that night, and I heard later from some of my ex-coworkers that it had the manager so upset that they went home as well, but that’s beside the point. On the whole drive home, all I could do was laugh. I felt so much better, like a giant weight that had been hanging off my shoulders was suddenly gone.

Now, this blog really does have a point to it, and is not simply a “here, take a look at my life”. Every person understands things differently, but without the background behind it, this might not make sense. I joined Habit during my time being unemployed, and I think it really helped me in not only deciding what I needed to keep my life in order, but to help me figure out what I liked to do in my free time, and what was really important to me. It was my first time in years where I didn’t have a job, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went to the library, started reading books about habits and doing research, took to the wiki like it was going out of style, and edited. Really, that’s what made me happy.

I have a new job now, and have been learning a lot of information. During training, I stopped working on the wiki because it was hard for me to assimilate all the information that I needed to assimilate and still have a mind for doing homework and the editing of the wiki. But I’m finding the more I settle into this job, the more I can let go of the other one. It was still there all during my job search, still sitting on my shoulder, whispering things in my ear like “what if this place is worse, what if the manager is worse, what if you find out you would have been better off staying and bending your will to grovel at the feet of your old manager?” And the more that the darkness slips away, the more I find I am sitting down at the end of the day and looking for the fun things to do again. Habit is a daily visit, almost to the point of being annoyed with myself because I check off too many things in the morning and run out of things to check off by the afternoon, but it has become a nice staple to my life. I think I might add the wiki and writing challenge back into my daily list of fun things to do now, and see if I can keep the darkness fully at bay.

By the way, I read the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” and really felt like I had spent enough time Hawing around. This was a great way to help get motivated. Now I just need to work on making sure my balance is good enough to notice if the darkness starts again, and take steps to remove myself from it.