I lost my job on Monday.
It was a long shot, really. I’d never had a communications role, and here I was coming in at a level that I didn’t think I was ready for, and as it turned out, I wasn’t.
I can’t remember the last time I had a job so incredibly full of contradiction: I loved working there while also having the worst case of imposter syndrome I’ve ever had. As it turns out, it wasn’t imposter syndrome but just an accurate personal assessment that I was completely out of my depth.
It hurts to think I blew it after only three months – I simply wasn’t good enough to pass my probation – but I’m okay.
This is the sort of thing we’re told not to talk about in the public sphere, which makes me even sadder. We spend so much time on days and campaigns dedicated to mental health, but so often we don’t let people talk about events that can cause poor mental health in the way that will best help them heal, and sometimes, yes, that is in a place where everyone can see.
The biggest thing about this has been how much of a difference there is between my most recent employment experience and the one that came before at 2WEB in Bourke. There I was doing really well work-wise, but health-wise I was quickly going downhill fast. When I left, my boss was emphatic that if I was ever in a position where I needed a job again, I should call him first as he would have me back in a heartbeat. Despite all that, I was burned out by a lack of social life, being hours away from friends and family, an inability to get out and see the region that I was talking to, and having a work and personal life that was basically confined to a two block radius of my workplace. So I had to go.
Suddenly, I was in a new position where wasn’t good at my job. I was doing okay, but not reaching the standards expected of me. In part, this was because of my health – I had paralysis events and seizures at work and had to take whole days off to recover from both. I’m certain that my usually charming level of scatterbrain rocketed to new levels, to the point where I was regularly making what were what I thought were small mistakes that were often picked up by others and seen as incredibly unprofessional for my role. I wanted to do the best I could for myself, my team and the organisation, and I think that I was doing the best that I could, but that best wasn’t good enough for them, and more importantly from my own perspective, it wasn’t as good as my best had previously been. I could feel that I was slipping.
Whether this degradation in my output was due to burnout or a side effect of the weird things my brain has thrown at me over the years, it rattled me. I worry that each seizure and paralysis event is doing something to my brain that I won’t see the ramifications of until years later, and this could be one of those things. To distrust your own brain is arguably one of the most terrifying things you can have happen to you, because often you’re the only one who can see the signs, especially if they come in moments where you’re alone or just appear to be minor things to those around you who aren’t seeing them add up over time.
Either way, this unplanned three month long employment experiment – going straight from one job to another in a matter of days when the original intention had been to take time to rest, investigate diagnostic pathways around my paralysis events, and change some of my health habits – has left me with two key things: 1) substantially more funds than I would have had without it, and 2) a new experience that will certainly come in handy in future writing projects, which I now have the time and more importantly the energy to write.
So really, it’s not all bad being unemployed. (Though I will be avoiding Centrelink for as long as humanly possible.)
Noni Doll 