When Life Throws You Curve Balls, Yell “Plot Twist” and Move On!
If you haven’t yet figured it out, I went on another hiatus, after LITERALLY just writing about how I was making a comeback after my last hiatus, I’ve had a few more curve balls thrown my way. This year has been a series of unfortunate events, and life has felt like a cosmic joke.
To fill you, dear reader, in on life lately…
In December 2022 I was asked to talk with my director under the guise of “just getting to know you” only to be targeted and interrogated in an attempt to call me out. I was asked “Do you even like your job?” followed by some not-so-subtle statements hinting that I might be on the chopping block and despite the numbers I was producing, was not being successful in my role. This put me on edge through the holidays and into the new year. This conversation also led to me having to let out some of my mental health diagnoses and treatment plans, things I wasn’t yet ready to open up about.
January 2023 my car’s engine decided it no longer wanted to chug along. My car experienced catastrophic engine failure, thankfully I had purchased an extended warranty, but Hyundai had extended their warranties to cover 150,000 miles which I was not at yet so Hyundai foot the bill for the new engine. Little did I know my car would sit at the shop for almost FOUR MONTHS. I was lucky enough that my parents had a spare car I could use at that time, but it was frustrating.
February the microaggressions and negative interactions with the manager continued. Not only were my ideas repeatedly denied, but they were pitched a week or two later as her ideas and I was pretty much over it. The feelers went out for the job market. I decided to go ahead and report this director to HR only to be mocked and told “they would never act that way” and to “just talk with them” and then laughed at when I said I feared retaliation… little did I know…
3 days later after being laughed at and told I was worried about the wrong things and reminded of the “Zero tolerance” policy against retaliation, I began getting micromanaged further via email. Apparently responding to their intrusive emails with too much detail would only make it worse. ALL requests before this for assistance both to this director and BOTH of the assistant directors were ignored, my opening up about my disabilities and requests for BASIC ACCOMMODATIONS (which I was entitled to in accordance with the ADA). In my first meeting, I was called a few things including disrespectful, and told “As your boss’s boss, you are to respect me and my position and speak to me accordingly. When I ask you for something, you send it immediately.” I was then forced to have WEEKLY meetings to go over “action items” I was to complete and THREE trackers on top of the meeting trackers I was to fill out weekly for another meeting, having my events and details on my calendar, uploading the event details and the flyers and when I sent them to the school and/or they were delivered in Microsoft Planner, etc. That was not enough, I needed MORE detailed trackers, which literally took more of my day to fill out because I wasn’t already struggling enough. After two weeks of these meetings and “Action items” (the trackers) I finally got to have a one-on-one with my ACTUAL direct supervisor and was reassured I wasn’t on an improvement plan and wouldn’t be, they were just concerned I didn’t care about my job anymore. Of course, the best way to re-engage an employee who’s burnt out is to micromanage them and give them more work, as we all know! Just a few weeks after that meeting I was put on a formal improvement plan, and then literally fired a week later.
I forgot to mention while I was dealing with work, our sewer line kept flooding the basement (after 4 times of having Roto-Rooter come out) we finally got the line scoped and found out we’d need to replace the whole line from the house to the sidewalk, which as I’m sure you can imagine is neither easy to do nor cheap.
In April, I started back working at my part-time job to help with the bills while we waited for Unemployment to come through. I went to Florida to help my parents with some remodeling on their condo that had some damage from the hurricane that went through. A day or so after coming home, my childhood dog died, that one hurt, not even going to downplay it. It’s always hard to lose someone you care about and pets especially, we didn’t even get to say goodbye and it was super sudden. Life continued into May applying to jobs and working whenever and wherever I could.
June kicked off with a BANG, literally, I took a solid fall on June 1 down some stairs and essentially broke my ankle. Not only was I dealing with a gnarly sinus infection for two weeks at this point, but now I got to deal with the pain in my ankle. I thought it was a bad sprain, but an MRI showed otherwise. An impact fracture (deep bone bruise on steroids) on the bottom of my tibia (the main weight-bearing bone of your lower leg and ankle), a bone bruise on the top of my foot swelling of course, a fusion, a small tendon tear, some other damages and lastly some fluid on my ankle. It took me over a month to get an appointment with an Ortho which led to 4 weeks in a walking boot, followed by 8 in a brace and Physical Therapy to get back on track.
July, FINALLY a turn of events, I landed a job after 200+ job applications 50+ interviews (including multiple rounds), and roughly 4 offers throughout the search. Things are moving up for me as I adjust to a new career, well, returning to Communications, and a new company environment where I’m in the office regularly.
Now this isn’t to say good things didn’t happen in that time, but I was down BAD. My depression and anxiety were the worst they’ve been, and the timing of things was not working out. One of the fun things about losing your job is you lose your insurance, and your options are to pay double for Kobra coverage or find the next most affordable option but know there’s a chance you’ll lose some of your doctors. In my case, I lost access to a few of my providers that helped me with psychiatric care.
As much as I wanted to get back into creating, I just couldn’t get myself to write like life was so great. I couldn’t pull myself out of my pity party, and I don’t think anyone really wants to read a ton of negative stuff. Now that I’m back into communications, I am creating daily. I’m creating graphics, long-form newsletters, social media posts, and misc. forms of content. I’m working to find my balance of creating for work and then for myself and hopefully the blog! While I’ve yet to master the world of Romanticizing my life and creating aesthetic content for Instagram, I do want to get back into writing and get this blog really going this time, now that I’m just a few months away from the first anniversary of starting this blog and yet, I’ve posted MAYBE 3 times since February.
With all that being said, I have a lot of plans and ideas coming, and be on the lookout for more new content.
