A Rose-tinted Life

Happy Lunar New Year to all!

I’m now enjoying the last bits of my sudden 2-week hiatus from work and I’m very reluctant to go back on Monday.

I keep reminding myself that work is not all about my personal satisfaction, there are a lot of factors that make up job satisfaction.  I remember being asked the same question at the Mass Comm interview and  I said, “Nothing can be totally fun and glam, there’ll be the boring bits and  you have to take them both. I’m sure I can learn something in the boring lessons to help enhance my total Mass Comm experience.”

That may have sounded rather glib, but I kid you not, I really believe it. I honestly don’t mind the boring mundane bits when I’m doing anything  because there will be the bits where it makes it fun and worth my while. Just as long as the boring mundane bits don’t become more than the fun worthwhile bits. Or the depressing disillusioned bits are tougher to bear than the emotionally satisfying bits.

I’ve held off  talking about it publicly but I think I trust my blog readers to empathise and sympathise than to question my choices. I’m glad there are just the few of you who know this blog and know the position I’m in. I’ve chosen to talk about it here and now because the “older people” I’ve chosen to talk to have made it more stressful than helped elevate my anxieties. I’ve prayed about it, cried about it – I’m tired of feeling like an emotional wreck for the last couple of months and I want to do something about it.

I like to think of myself as an optimist, someone  who goes at something with gung and ho and regrets nothing. I still don’t regret what I’ve chosen to do, but I am quite surprised that only 7 months on, I’m feeling like it’s time for a job switch.

If there’s one more thing I believe, it’s that anything can be too good to be true. My dream career that literally dropped onto my lap is becoming more of a chore and a burden to me than something I really want to do for the rest of my life. On top of that, there are the depressing, disillusioning bits that are harder for me to bear.

I am not suffering excessively at work, the Em isn’t maliciously evil or anything, my colleagues are sweet and all, but my gut tells me that this just isn’t right for me. It’s the same fear that I felt just a month before I came home from Melbourne and I was standing at the crossroads between this and another job I applied for because I knew I’d love it. The only problem? I worked for an NPO before and this was another NPO.  In terms of career advancement, I wasn’t about to go anywhere.

This, on the other hand, would give me a leg up. Never mind that it was just a tiny company, even tinier than my old company, but I would be exposed to the real corporate life, I would have the opportunity to know and rub shoulders with real corporate people.

However, 7 months on, I feel like a caged bird. I have never known to sit still in one place for 8 hours on end and just type away at my computer. I’m infamously bad at administration and yet I’m assuming a job scope that is all just about administration. I am supposed to develop programs, but I pretty much do everything else from data entry to IT support. I have no contact with the outside world, apparently phone contact is supposed to suffice, but who yer kiddin’?

More so, what hurts me most is when I know nothing I do ever pleases the boss (the perfectionist) or me (the bigger perfectionist). I cried in front of the boss during my performance appraisal because I believed I didn’t contribute as much as my boss said I did.

Sigh … it’s not a pretty picture. With so much complaints, it should be easy to go isn’t it?  But I’m finding it so hard to scrape up enough courage to do anything!

She’s invested a lot of her time in grooming me, training, explaining to me why things work the way they do. She’s given me a lot of say in what goes and what doesn’t and criticizes me constructively for what I do wrong.

She’s not evil like I said … but she’s not everything I hyped her out to be.

I’m very tired about the whole thing. Very very tired about thinking so much about it. But this is my first biggest challenge in my work history … I wonder how it’ll pan out? Can I last till July when I have fulfilled my verbal commitment of staying for 1 year? Shall I just submit my letter in May and give her the required two months notice without any prior negotiation for anything else? Or shall I speak to her about a career development and salary review even before the review comes in July?

Should I find a job now and submit my letter as soon as possible, disregarding the fact that I’d promised her I’d work a year?

URGHHHHHH