Nov 23, 2019 Life Update: A Year of Self-Sabotage, Regrets, and Lack of Self-Control

Originally published/last updated on myearlyretirementjourney.com on Nov 23, 2019. 

Self-Sabotage

• I just bought a house online…well I put $95 down and was sent a purchase agreement. I have never seen the house. I don’t even know if I want a house. I convinced myself I could save money since best case scenario…after 2 years…I’ll be saving about $200/mon on housing costs.
• Last Friday, after waiting 6 weeks to hear from an employer after interview, I sent them an I-reject-you-before-you-reject-me email in an emotional moment. This week I was rethinking that decision given the fact that at Week 5 a recruiter had called to tell me I was still being considered. And at Week 4, another recruiter had emailed me to tell me I was still being considered …while they were doing third round interviews. BUT this was after hearing nothing from them for 4 weeks although I had emailed to follow-up and sent three emails to ask about travel reimbursement.
• I have been so discouraged by the hiring process this year, I haven’t prepped as much for my last 2 interviews.
• Not getting an offer from my latest round of interviews = loss of control = emotional distress = buying houses online.

Regrets

•  I regret quitting my job. If I had never quit, I would not have ended up at my current employer which is worse in different ways.
• I regret taking this job. I’m treated like a number. The training and management is chaotic. The higher ups don’t make sense and as long as there is a warm body to take calls that’s all that matters. Their logic and lack of procedures has been consumingly frustrating.
• I regret applying for 200 jobs. The emotional distress was foreseeable.  The amount of discrimination was also foreseeable, but I just didn’t want to believe it. I was better off not knowing. I have no one to blame but myself.
• I regret trying to move up at work.  See previous bullet point.
• I regret getting reacquainted with old friends over the course of this year. I would’ve been better off not knowing how their lives turned out. It turns out a few thought I was dead. Yet none reached out to my family.  It would’ve been better not knowing there was nothing to rekindle.

Lack of Self-Control

• This is more a combination of regrets and self-sabotage. More specifically, when things seem out of my control, I self-sabotage; do things I later regret; and self-indulge in bad behavior. All the while I’m self-soothing by telling myself it doesn’t matter or it’s not that bad because the only person it hurts is me. 
• I emailed friends and old friends every time I got a rejection email. I just had to lash out, it felt like. I had to do something to publish my pain. Nothing nasty, just less edited venting. In truth, I thought it was friends I could vent and be honest with. People aren’t really in my life like that, and I’m not in theirs like that.
• Buying the house online.
• Quitting my job.
• Under-performing at interviews. This is a combination of past experiences that I let dictate how I would act when faced with a similar situation so as not to feel that way again. It didn’t work. It just compounded the negative feelings.
• Bad interviews affected my communication with Aunty MERJ. I would essentially ghost her because I knew I would not be as patient as I needed to be with her.
• Spending all my travel points to go to Tampa because negative self-talk convinced I would die in NC and would not need to travel anywhere with those points. There was nothing left to see.
• Emailing the previously mentioned employer that I didn’t need their travel reimbursement because they were taking too long to respond. But really it’s because they weren’t offering me a job. Since I rejected them before they rejected me, we’ll never know the outcome. So I lost out potentially on a job and $600 of travel reimbursement.
• Emailing other employers I-reject-you-before-you-reject-me emails when I hadn’t heard from then within a timeline either they or I established.
• DID I MENTION I JUST BOUGHT A HOUSE ONLINE?! WHAT WAS I THINKING…
• It just feels easier sometimes to make the wrong decision knowing it’s wrong than spend anymore energy trying to figure out what the right decision is.

This is not an exhaustive list in either category, by far.

Mostly I just feel like this year could’ve been a wash if I had just let it be, but I tried to do things I saw other people doing knowing full well that NEVER turns out well for me. I have no one to blame but myself. Despite my efforts, my destiny seems to be one of an aimlessly over-educated field worker at the call center plantation living in a crappy townhouse she bought online in a sketchy part of town.  #americangirlproblems