Stephanie Cake

The past seven days have constituted one hell of a week. And I mean that in a negative sense.
I promised myself I would never speak of my job in a semi-public electronic forum such as this (after the post I wrote a few weeks ago) but I feel that I must break that promise (again).

This past Sunday marked exactly one year... 12 months... 365 days .... 8760 hours..... 525,600 minutes.... (ok, ok, I'll stop!) at my present job. Its mostly been a happy year. While I'm not a huge fan of the work I do - I'm really just not a huge fan of work in general - I'm pretty successful at it and, for the most part, its more good than bad. The company I work for is a great company. Its young and growing. The people are work with are fun and most are really nice and seem to genuinely respect me.

But for the past 7 days I have not wanted to get out of bed. I have been seriously thinking about a new job. At first I thought... "oh god, the dreaded autumnal depression again". Then I realized it has nothing to do with my mental state. It has to do with my relationship, or lack thereof, with my boss. She is someone I really like. But I currently do not like her management style. And its putting a very serious crimp in my happiness.

There's no need to go into the specifics here. I've bitched about it to enough people, I don't think I need to bitch about it in writing -- although I guess I actually am right now, come to think of it. But I digress. The point is, I'm anxiety ridden. I'm feeling alienated and downtrodden. I'm very unhappy. I'm actually quite pissed.

And I don't know what to do about. Its scary to find myself on the flip side of an employee/employer problem (have I ever mentioned that I'm in Human Resources??). Being the head of HR, it gives me no place to go. Particularly when my boss is my problem and my boss is also the owner of the company I work for.

When faced with such drama on my last job (and let me clarify before I start sounding like a demented loser who can't keep a job... it was actually a totally different scenario but a similarly structured company, hence the same feelings of helplessness) I ended up totally decimated. The situation was unrecoverable. They ended up firing me (errr.... 'eliminating my job', I mean). And I suffered further duress. There were lawyers and accusations and threats. And I suffered even further duress. I was unemployed and at the point of a newvous breakdown. It was a low point in my life.

And I don't ever want to go there again. I'm like a phobic housepet that way. I learn from bad experiences and make every effort to avoid them again at all costs. So I've been feeling very uncertain and miserable this week since the old feelings of job-gone-bad have rolled around.

Until I read my Free Will Astrology horoscope. It sorta coincides with a horoscope from about 4 months ago and, although I'm a HUGE skeptic, I'm also sorta naive and desperately want to believe sometimes. So this one really freaked me out.....

"I lost the plot for a while," says a character in Nick Hornby's novel,
High Fidelity. "And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the
intermission, the popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign." I'm betting you
could have said something like that recently, Libra. The story of your life
seemed to have been whisked out from under you and banished to the wilderness on
the outskirts of limbo, where the wasteland meets no man's land. That's the bad
news. The good news is that while you may never recover the plot you started
with, you'll soon find a brand new one that's better than the original.

It kinda hits close to home. Not to mention, I love High Fidelity - - the book more than the movie... but then again what's not to like about the movie... any Jon Cusack movie has a place in my heart. So I have some renewed hope. No matter how misguided, grasping or gullible.