Employment and mental health
Limited Joy
I landed what I thought would be a dream job, three years after designing the journals. I was so optimistic about the job. It did not take long for the dream to turn into a nightmare. The job was all consuming, it consumed my energy, it consumed my time, most of all it consumed my sanity. I watched my peace disappear and, in its place, permanent anxiety resided. My mental health spiraled.
Soon enough, I would wake up with complete dread seeping through my being and I would drag myself to work and wish for another job. I remember more than once, taking a walk during lunch time rather than eating, just so I could get my thoughts in order. None of my thoughts pointed towards longevity in the job. I recognized very quickly that God had not sent me to bring any systematic change in the company or He would have given me the authority to match the changes that were required.
Accept what you cannot change
As a junior in the department, I was often at the mercy of people’s whims. I asked myself one question, do I feel peace in leaving? And the answer was no. I knew that If I was going to stay and survive, I needed a reality check. Life is hard. That is a fact. So, my job was just evidence of a pre-requisite of life. The next thing I asked myself was if I could change these people or their habits to make my life easier. The unequivocal answer to that was no. Could I change the systems that I was working in? The unequivocal answer to that was again, no.
For my mental health, I accepted the permanence of the things I could not change as an employee, then figured out a way to work around them. Only then did I find some semblance of peace. Acceptance was the first step to a positive flow in my work situation. I stopped looking forward to being in the in-crowd. By eliminating the expectation, I freed myself from disappointment. I accepted that there would always be a certain level of prejudice towards me because of my race and gender, so I freed myself from expecting good treatment. I released everything that was not in my power to God.
Do what you can
What was in my power was my work. My job required me to be highly organized and meticulously pay attention to detail. So, I put a workflow in place to make sure that I was always ahead of schedule in delivery. I looked at the full spectrum of my job and formed great relationships with stakeholders. I did them favors, checked on them, laughed with them and made sure our relationship was not just about demands, but also camaraderie. This made work so much easier as they delivered what I needed faster and if they could not, they would let me know and I ended up enjoying working with these stakeholders. This really helped my mental health, for a while.
I checked on my close neighbors, the people to my left, my right, and the people behind me. Eventually I started walking into the office each day with a sunny disposition and greeted everyone with a smile. As soon as I sat on my desk, I would pay two scriptures over myself. Psalm 84 verse 11-12 and psalm 118 vs 24. I chose to be positive in a negative environment and soon enough I made a few friends who cared more about me than the work I was delivering.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield; The Lord bestows grace and favor and honor; No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly. O Lord of hosts, How blessed and greatly favored is the man who trusts in You [believing in You, relying on You, and committing himself to You with confident hope and expectation].
Psalm 84 verses 11- 12
This [day in which God has saved me] is the day which the Lord has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Psalm 118 verse 24
Positivity did not help
Though my attitude had changed, work remained difficult. I encouraged myself as much as I could and on days I could not deal, I would call my friend and ask her to pray with me during my lunch breaks. This helped me so much. Amid all this my health was suffering a lot. My mental health was appalling and eventually this started to affect me physically. It did not take long for chest pains and chronic headaches to set in. I went to specialist after specialist, and they all had the same answer. “There is nothing wrong with you.” They just gave me pain killers and sent me home. Deep down I knew, that despite my great efforts to keep the faith and hold my head high, the job was taking more out of me than I was getting out of it.
Mental health vs Employment
I had some conversations with some friends of mine and one friend shared how he had a nervous breakdown and had to stop his work and take a forced leave for a while, to recover. This scared me because he was one of the most relaxed people I knew. I heard another friend of ours had a stroke while performing on stage. Furthermore, I had a separate conversation with another friend who had to be admitted in hospital to prevent either a stroke, pulmonary embolism or heart attack , as his blood had started to clot in his legs. The first friend I spoke to stressed one thing to me, “if you fall dead today, they will replace you and the job will continue. They can replace an employee, but no one can replace the person you are”
This was a rude awakening. What made it all so hard was that I felt I could not leave because I needed the money, but was the money worth my life? I know a lot of people face this kind of choice every day. Stay in a job you hate to make a living or leave for your sanity and struggle financially. Is there no middle ground? I looked at all my options. I had already decided that I wanted to study, but I had put that on the backburner to raise money. Now I asked myself, what would it take for me to pursue my studies?
Next Step
I started looking up programs I wanted to study, but I did not want my studies to just be another escape from a bad situation. I did not want one bad situation to throw me off track for the rest of my life. Thus, I started asking myself what I want to do then I looked for study programs that would sharpen my skills in those areas. I pursued it headlong. I finally got accepted in a course I was excited to study after I took tests and applied, after a few fails, passes and rejections. Now that hope was on the horizon, all I had to do was survive a few months and leave. Then, COVID hit, and we were all placed in lockdown.
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