This week I ‘celebrate’ my one-year anniversary as a worker bee. The rat race makes time fly by faster than the speed of light, as the time in which one can actually do anything is reduced to a mere two days a week. The rest of it goes by in a grey rush from chore to chore, deadline to deadline so that it feels as if Monday has barely started when it’s already time for Friday night drinks. Weekday evenings are good for nothing and even during weekends I hardly do what I have been planning or wanting to do: it’s not just time, it’s mainly energy. And so books pile up on various to-read piles, I can’t keep up with my TV shows, no cultural activities get scheduled – and my creative juices stop flowing so this space remains as empty as a deserted turtle shell. Selling precious time for precious money, or selling your life in order to be able to live… depressing indeed. And I haven’t even added kids yet to that formula! Anyway, all this just to say that it seems a lot longer than one year and that my days of miserable unemployment and even those blissful university years are far far behind me by now.
Being the loyal introvert that I am, I can’t live with job-hopping so I can also celebrate my one year with the firm. Even before my temp contract had expired, I got offered a permanent position within my department, which I accepted. I still haven’t figured out what I would really like to do (and I doubt I ever will) so for the time being, this is more than OK. Plus, I get quickly attached to people and habits so I couldn’t bare walking away from my colleagues and bosses before getting to know them just a little bit better. Silly, I know. So I stayed, and have since given it all I got and have tried very hard to please, always to please: anticipating needs, smiling pleasantly in hallways and baking cakes to bring in on Mondays. As work is where I am most of the time and I don’t have a family to go home to in the evenings, it really is my main (if not only) dedication – even if that dedication probably goes unnoticed.
All of this is enough to make me at least content, until of course my inner demons start acting up, wrecking every aspect about my life, distorting my good judgment, leaving me sad, doubtful, paranoid and unworthy to live as every comment or look is turned into something negative and everything I have felt good about is suddenly worth less than nothing. But oh well, these are only phases and having them just comes with the territory of being me I suppose.
