Rejected Personally and Professionally and 6 Years as a Working Woman

It's Sunday! And tomorrow is a holiday!

I spent the last hour or so on the Ask  A Manager site. Honestly, after 2 weeks of abstaining from Old Boss Stuff, I was on the mend.

But the chat messages just re-ignited the feelings. Part of me does hope I NEVER HEAR FROM HER AGAIN.

But as I was reading the archives on that site, I felt both justified and wrong at the same time.

Things I did wrong

- Wanting her to cook for me

- Wanting to be her really close friend (but she has those at work!)

- Wanting to travel with her (yes, I sent her a link for a groupon trip to Ireland)

- Wanting her to visit me

I think she probably thought I was joking, but I was being 100% serious. But I guess you can't do those things with your boss. I've seen it done before, but I guess you're not supposed to. I can't confirm she's done those things with her "work family," but she certainly didn't want to do them with me.

So in my inappropriate demands, I ultimately felt rejected by her personally. Like - why don't you like me? Why don't you like me as much as I like you? Why don't you like me as much as everyone else? Why don't you like me as much as Old Buddy!

And the professionally, when I could never get her to call me her Top Performer or anything of the sort or do anything above and beyond to keep me (i.e. salary increase or better bonus score), I felt rejected professionally.

Even yesterday when I hated the thought of her and hated I ever knew her, today I'm back to why don't you like me? 

Yesterday I was confident in my decision to leave and to not engage in the chat messages, today I'm back to still wanting some sort of chat to salvage whatever relationship I thought we had. 

I know logically it's a case of a really friendly woman who was maybe intrigued by a new shiny toy AT FIRST, but in the end she wasn't that into me.  It just sucks emotionally.

It sucks because there's nothing I can do about it. And I know logically having the conversation is magical thinking in my mind. I can't make her like me, but I still want it. I still want her to like me. I still want to be her friend.

And honestly, in this moment, I think she could convince me to come back just to be near her and interact with her again. Yeah, sad but true. 

At this point, tears are streaming down my face as I type this.

I already know trying to rekindle friendships after a "friend" has done this to me in the past has not worked out, but I still want it. I just want the delusion back. 

I like being under her wing. I felt protected there - until I wasn't.  Just a morsel of her attention after 100 hours of work had been enough at some point. 

Just a text, a message to know that someone was thinking about me. Just any sort of special attention. 

I know I'm mourning a delusion, but I can't make my brain stop. I know there wasn't a true friendship there so there's nothing really to hope for in the future, but somehow I still feel mournful. 

I'm still replaying conversations and interactions in my mind and romanticizing them as better than they were. 

Other things you can't say when you're trying to get over a break-up from your Old Boss

- Please forget you ever knew me. 

- Please don't message me if it's not business critical.

- I'm trying to get over you, so please don't message me anymore.

her: what do you mean?

 me: I felt rejected by you personally when you declined to maintain a friendship and professionally when you didn't ask me to stay or trying to keep me. So messages like these while normally innocuous are quite triggering and distressing to me. (for added measure: I hope you can can understand. or like the celebrities: please respect my privacy at this time)

OR

me: I know you mean well, but it hurts to get messages like these from you because I obviously still miss and love you and you don't. Do you? 

Also

Congratulations to me! I survived 6 years in the workplace! It seems both long and short compared to the 30 years we were all promised. I started my (3rd?) career after Labor Day 2015.

It's bittersweet. 

I've been a working woman for  6 years. I certainly don't spend enough time patting myself on the back. Bad things always happen to me when I spend too much time complimenting myself. Watch - in the next few weeks something terrible is going to happen.

Oh wait, it already has! 

Anyway, yep after toiling away at professional school for 4 years, my prize was more work!! I was creeping the people on my current team, and it's always so suprising when people started working the decade I was born. Part of me wonders what their bank accounts look like?? Part of me wonders, wow! I did notice for a lot of the older generations, at the max, this is their 3rd company in the last 30 or 40 years. This my 3rd company in 6 years and 2nd company in 1.

There's definitely a paradigm shift for sure. I think people found a spot and just stayed. It's only now that our generation is looking for things like work balance and other accoutrements in the workplace. We are a greedy and needy generation by comparison. I wonder if we're anymore satisfied. I would wager not. For someone like me, there is some ...satisfaction ...doesn't seem like the right word... there is a measure of stability in just having a job that funds your life. It's like a marriage, you just decide to work through as long as it meets your financial "needs." 

Honestly, if not for FIRE, I'd probably still be at Call Center #1 or even Call Center #2. All were quite tolerable. And for the most part a pretty good gig in retrospect. It's only when I started feeling like I should be doing more or making more, that the angst to leave settled in.  I think it was really Call Center #3 that the actual work started to make me want to leave. But I think if Call Center #3 had been my first job, I would not have known it didn't need to be that way. 

I think it's just how you position a job in your life. Is it just a necessary anchor to pay bills and you carve your life around it. I think that's most people until something really goes wrong. I think that's most relationships probably.

I think when people left Call Center #1, it would always make me question what I was still doing there. I always went down to the 80/20 argument. It was meeting 80% of what I thought my needs were - steady income, manageable, clear expectations, predictable. I felt comforted by the fact that it was mostly the "rest home" for burned out people in my profession. I was glad I didn't take the crooked path to get there - i.e. the burn out route. 

It was okay to not want more. I had settled into my mediocre life. Let's be honest, I was still feeling strong feelings that I was stuck and wondering if this was all there is. So while I'm beating myself up for ruining what was a stable thing, I did want to see what else was out there.

There was definitely more money but at what cost? 

What is the opportunity cost of leaving vs staying at Call Center #1.

I think before I'd calculated a net difference of about 10k in salary after all the things. 

I'd still be alone. Mathematically, I'd still be closer to FIRE. I think the market gains are confusing me vs how much I've actually contributed. 

If I had stayed at Call Center #1

I would not have had this year of turmoil. 

But would I have had a year of feeling ungrateful and stuck?

I would still be working from home b/c of COVID

I'd be in my nicer neighborhood

(I have just as many bugs in this place as the last place, so no net gain there.)

In this moment, I'm having a hard time seeing what the net gain of working at Call Center #3 was other than some temporary emotional triumph. 

I was getting a bit more anxious with phone calls, so that's a bit of an unknown but who know what a vacation might have fixed. 

I think in this moment knowing how little time I have left and knowing that nothing really happens after a big salary and cool title, I don't know if the job hop was worth it.

$20k seems like a lot of money, and it is but the impact to my emotional state vs the impact to my net worth WAS NOT WORTH IT. 

Whether I look at the actual $10k I got or the 20k it's only a small percentage of my total assets at this time. While this job affected 100% of my life. 

In this case the Devil You Don't Know was a bigger devil. 

I mean if you look back at my posts from when I was working at Call Center #1, I had reached a resigned place at the very least. But I had such minimal success building a social life that I thought I would have greater control on professional life. Wrong. 

I fantasized about escaping work but I think it was just "work" not that job itself. 

I don't know... I'm just rambling at this point. I was looking for a change. I made it and I regret it. 

There's just not enough stories out there about that in my opinion and I know that's something I've said before.

It DOES hurt to ask (when it comes to salary increases).

The WORST they can say is NO belies the whole picture.

JOB hunting is SOUL-CRUSHING (so if you're not coming from a soul-crushed place, beware!)

I think I just over-committed to FIRE a bit because it was so goal and task-oriented.