Improvements

The events of this week have sunk in a bit more now and I feel OK about it all.

The salary/promotion thing is essentially me cashing in some political capital that I’ve been sitting on for a long time. At my last performance review, in March, I was told that the company isn’t doing well and that was used to justify reducing my pay rise this year. They repeated this to me again in August over a different matter involving a trivial amount of money, which they really made a mess of. I don’t like work politics, but I seem to have been forced into playing that game and I’m playing it better than my employer at the moment.

I don’t know whether this will actually result in anything tangible, but the fact they have decided to review things is an implicit admission that money isn’t quite as tight as they led me to believe.

But that in itself is kind of weird, because it means that the company just lied to my face twice, and they have only been spurred into doing the right thing by me laying down an ultimatum. Am I supposed to just forgive that? I have real trouble with dishonesty. It destroys trust and respect. I forgive very easily when people admit guilt and show an understanding of wrongdoing, but people often don’t, and that makes it hard for me to trust they won’t do it again.

I think a problem for me is that I’m usually quite agreeable and mild mannered, so if I find myself laying down an ultimatum, it’s probably because my trust in the other party has been seriously damaged, and it’s hard to recover from that.

So, as yet, nothing has changed and I have decided to restart my job-search next week. I have had 4 relevant leads from recruiters over the past couple of days so I’ll kick those off over the weekend. I hope I can keep my anxiety in check better than I could last time around. At the moment it seems very simple and unintimidating, but my self-awareness on anxiety triggers has not been very good lately. I’ll be honest though, I really think the citalopram will greatly improve my interview performance this time around. Anxiety or not, I am functioning a lot better socially.