March 5, 2020: Sick

Originally published/last updated on myearlyretirementjourney.com on 05Mar2020.

I have been sick for the last 4 or 5 days. I didn’t go to work the last 2. I’ve decided to lean into Call Center #2’s generous sick and vacation time policy.

I sometimes feel like when I miss work they’re going to fire me. The other day I was actually thinking what I would do if I got fired. I know I wouldn’t recover.

Now that Aunty MERJ is gone and I have this sketch of her life at least from my perspective, I think I’m putting together a death date for myself. I know this scares people, but it’s something I think about often. I think it goes hand-in-hand with planning an early retirement.

More on that later.

Just wanted to update that I’m still alive and sick. These are the moments when having a partner might be helpful. Although when my coworker was sick, her partner still left for the day. I would want someone at my beck and call bringing me food and buying me Tylenol.

I think my Tylenol run on Tuesday took the wind out of me because I got a little worse Wednesday and Thursday.

I hate being sick. I mean who loves it. The one thing I will say is working in the call center at least no work is really going to be waiting for me. As much as I don’t like being on the phones and tried so desperately to leave last year, the call center life definitely has some identifiable benefits.

At the end of the day, no matter what the other millennials say, I’m not one for work, meaningful or otherwise. So even being in talks with another company to move up, it was just kind of hitting me (again) how the next step in my career (or so I thought), would require so much more work. i mean a lot of stuff I don’t enjoy doing – meetings, collaborating, lit searches. So I don’t know why I’m so hung up on pursuing it.

I think I’m just ready to be done with work in general. Right now, I’m thinking two years here (that makes me really happy to think out loud), and just making a run for it!