Stuck

I try not to blog about my work.  It has taken me years to master the art of “not taking work home with you”.  I only vent once and that’s on the five minute ride home, and the moment I shut my front door of my house behind me, is the moment I close off work until 9:00 a.m. the next day.

But today is one of those days in my life where I am wondering what the hell I am doing with my life.  I am skilled in my job, and I am not saying that as a boast, but more as a fact.  Twenty-four years of this job, not in this office, but in this particular field, and I suppose I should be skilled, or at least know enough that it looks like I actually know what I am doing.

But I have come to a point where I realize that I may have steered my career down the wrong path.  In fact, I am pretty sure I have been riding this roller coaster far too long and I am starting to get just a tad motion sick from all the ups and down, and I think the last five years, I have been constantly look for the proverbial barf bag.

I feel stuck. 

With our economy not as hard hit as the States, jobs are still scarce, well at least those ones that pay above the substandard par or above the poverty level. 

To top that off, I have never looked at my job as a career.  I have always just looked at it as means to subsidize my real life outside these four bland walls five days a week.

But today I was wondering what I was doing with myself.  My boss, a mild manner man, in all respects is pretty good to work with.  However, in the past two years or so, he’s become a bit verbally aggressive in his emails and some of them even borderline on meanness.  And today, after an onslaught of these emails, I yelled some choice profanities into the empty airspace around me, got up from my desk, went to the bathroom and hid in there where I proceeded to have a good cry.

As I stood there in the disgusting, shared public washroom, I started thinking to myself, when do you make the decision to change.  Do you change your career to something else that you would thoroughly enjoy but would ultimately put you at the bottom of the seniority heap with the lack of experience and a lessor pay which would no longer fund the things you enjoy outside of your work life?  Or do you just suck it up, put in your time, pray for retirement to come quickly in the next 25 years and stay in something that is sucking your soul dry in order to retain the monetary happiness of enjoying your few blissful days of freedom per week. It's not an easy choice especially when you value the freedom to do whatever you wish on your days off, but you also value being happy every day and not just the days unrelated to work. In all honesty, I don't hate my job, but it's moments like today that I find myself not very fond of it either.

In my dreams, I work for myself on a creative basis as a contributor for a women’s specific magazine with a monthly column on trying to maintain your sanity as you grow older, or I spend hours of my day just taking photographs of foliage and fauna and publishing it in nature inspired magazines, or better yet, I write a humorous bestseller on existing in an Average Life.  But as I get excited, my lack of confidence squishes my dreams and that niggling little voice says: “who would be interested in you Tracy”.  And then I get up in the morning and repeat each day as I have for the last 24 years.

Oh how I long to be unstuck, but I am careful what I wish for, because perhaps, once I am unstuck, I will wish I was stuck again.

Until Next Time.

Tracy