Tag: work

Back to normality

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

Or: citalopram day 36.

I’m back at work tomorrow after two weeks off, and needless to say I’m not really looking forward to it. I have found myself getting nervous every time I think about the fact I want to start a salary/promotion negotiation with my boss.

The market rate for my skills is about 50-60% higher than what I’m currently earning. I was incensed earlier when I saw that the company has posted an advert for an assistant role, with a salary higher than mine.

So I’ve decided I’m just going to go for it. As soon as I get to work tomorrow morning, after scanning my inbox, I will be sending my boss an email instigating the discussion. I was thinking “maybe I should wait til later in the week, and get settled in again”, but no. The timing is an opportunity. Who starts a salary negotiation the day they get back from a holiday, before they’ve even got settled back in? Someone who’s prepared to NOT get settled back in – that’s who.

The email I’ve drafted is succint and factual but I’ve also referenced a few complimentary things that have been said to me informally lately and questioned why I’ve experienced no career growth in the past seven years and why my salary is now well below market rate. I closed it by saying that I hope the company will “resolve the disappointing inconsistency between its words and actions”, which might get softened tomorrow morning, but maybe not.

Musical interlude:

So, how’s the citalopram going?

I feel very stressed when I think about this impending meeting. I think about the things my boss might say, the ways he might rebuff me, and I feel helplessness, anger and anxiety. That’s no different to before. The difference is this: And then I stop thinking about it.

Citalopram days 11-13

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The side effects seem to have settled down entirely now. My sleep is normal and the dreams have gone. Tiredness is hard to guage as we curently have a heatwave and I’ve been doing a lot of running, i.e. yes I’m tired but that’s expected. Nausea has disappeared and the not-quite-dry mouth isn’t something I’ve noticed recently.

Am I starting to feel better? I have no idea at the moment.

I’m still having trouble switching off from non-immediate worries. My mind is currently fixating on the fact that I have decided I ‘should’ initiate a promotion/salary negotiaton with my boss in a few weeks, which is stressful. But I have holiday before then so it’s still at least three weeks away. I don’t need to think about that right now. And yet, I am. I ended up drafting an email yesterday just to try to get it out of my head, which helped.

I’m guessing that the main way I’ll understand whether or not I’m feeling better is that I’ll look through these old blog posts and think “hmm, that doesn’t really bother me anymore”.

Health and things

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Citalopram days 7-10: I think it’s day 10 anyway. I’ve lost count. Nothing to report, really. I had some more nausea when I went up to 20mg but nothing much. I have felt pretty tired at times; mid-afternoon at my desk is a bit of a struggle some days. If it doesn’t wear off I might try taking it in the evening instead of morning.

Other health: I have been prescribed iron tablets again because my iron levels have dropped a lot and are approaching anaemia since I finished the previous course. But maybe that’s why I’m getting tired?

Having to take two sets of pills is not making my stomach happy though.

Mentally I’m feeling a bit lighter on average, which is promising as it’s still a few weeks before we really expect full effectiveness from the antidepressants. This morning at work there were things happening that would usually have bothered me, but they just washed over me. This afternoon wasn’t so easy though; I felt angsty and frustrated and went home feeling drained.

Things should get a bit easier now anyway because Becky is on holiday next week and then I have two weeks off. I have had a hard time switching off from the weird rudeness I get from her, which increases my anxiety a lot because I end up anticipating it and feeling that I have to be prepared for it so I don’t overreact. In reality, I don’t know why I even feel that way. I’m not a reactive person. She’s rude to me and I just ignore it at the time. It reflects badly on her, not on me. It upsets me later, but at the time, it just happens and the moment passes. Sometimes afterwards I feel like marching up to her desk and confronting her, but it’s not like I’d do that.

My counsellor told me I was feeling guilty about things I haven’t done (i.e. my fear of reacting), and she’s right. She came up with an interesting idea that I should reward myself whenever Becky is rude to me so that I stop dreading it. I think it might help reframe it. I’ve started carrying around some Fruit Pastilles in my bag, which are as yet unopened.

Citalopram day 1

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I had trouble getting to sleep last night and then I woke up super early and couldn’t go back to sleep, all because I was stressed and dreading going to work – is she going to be rude to me today? will I be able to handle it? After getting up I very impulsively decided to restart the Citalopram because something’s got to give at some point.

The doctor I saw last week advised me to try half-dosing to 10mg for a week or so, as I was concerned about side effects, so I did that.

lavenderandlevity (whose blog is incredible) convinced me yesterday that unless I actually give the tablets a fair chance, I’ll always be wondering if I should be taking them. Even if I quit my job tomorrow and removed all my immediate stress, I’d still need to get through a job-search at some point and I’m not entirely convinced I would actually do that at the moment, versus just… not bothering.

So, I took it this morning, and I have felt…

Physically, pretty rough: I am tired (hardly surprising given I haven’t slept much), nauseous (this is definitely the tablet) and my tongue feels weird. I think my appetite is a bit suppressed by the nausea. Hopefully this will pass in a few days.

Mentally though I’ve felt quite calm today. But this may just be the effects of the resolution to the meds or no meds argument that’s been going around my head continually.

So.

I need to promise myself something here. If these help and I start feeling calmer, I need to not use them to mask the fact work is a toxic workplace. I need to use them to instead give me the confidence to get into a non-toxic workplace so I can come off them ASAP.

I also need to be very careful about stomach bleeding, which SSRIs can exacerbate. I have always linked my occasional bleeds to running, so for the next week or so, I need to ‘stress test’ myself here, because if they are going to cause more bleeding, I need to know about it before my body starts to build a dependency on them. I did 11k this evening at a hard-ish pace (uanffected by the nausea, apparently), but the real test will be when I do 16-17k over the weekend.

Health bits

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I got more of my blood test results back today. My iron levels are borderline anaemic, and they’ve dropped a lot since January. I think I need to be on iron tablets again.

I wonder if this has affected how I’m feeling mentally. When my iron levels were low last year I ended up having a breakdown. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I also don’t feel I’ve ever really recovered from it. I don’t want to repeat that, so I will be back at my GP the first appointment I can get.

Work was tough today. I didn’t work hard at all and spent probably two hours in the kitchen chatting to people today, which should have made it an enjoyable day… but… the reason I did that was because I was struggling. I was in the kitchen alone early in the morning when Becky came in. She got part way through the door, saw I was in there, then made a huffing noise and turned around and walked out again. We always have to have the amateur dramatics with her. She always seems to want me to notice her. I know it reflects badly on her and not at all on me, but it upsets me. I was feeling unsettled anyway and this just pushed me over.

I don’t even know why she’s taken offense to me again; I haven’t spoken to her for months. I think that might be the problem. I think she wants a better relationship but doesn’t know how to achieve it, so she gets frustrated and goes out of her way to make me notice her being rude to me in the hope that I’ll do something differently and then via some magical process which requires no change or effort or communication on her part everything improves. Or maybe I’m just projecting because I thought about doing that too, but then I remembered I’m not 5 years old and it would look a lot like bullying.

But I’m not playing stupid games, so here we are.

I wish I’d seen my counsellor this week.

Work

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The other problem with work, apart from the social side of it, is the overwhelming feeling that I’m wasting my time here. I’ve been here 7 years and I haven’t progressed in any measurable way. It’s hardly surprising that I don’t feel respected by certain coworkers when my employer obviously doesn’t respect me either. Nobody else in the 7 years has been promoted, so it’s not me personally, but it’s still a problem.

The whole situation adds up to say that the company doesn’t value me, and it’s bad for my self esteem to continue working for a company that doesn’t value me – because, what does that say about me?

I was talking about this to my mum. She was horrified when I said I’d started taking anti-depressants, and, in fact, her extremely negative attitude towards them was one of the things that put me off taking them initially, because I didn’t want to deal with her disapproval (note: I know this is a bad reason).

I think she’s starting to ‘get’ it all a bit more. I told her this weekend that the most recent doctor said we were probably focusing on the wrong thing by looking at my diet for reasons as to my weight loss. I have been tracking my weight quite closely since June and I’ve lost 0.4kg since then. Mum was a lot less negative about anti-depressants this time when I mentioned the doctor again suggested I take them – she said “how do you feel about that?”, and she also said that if my job was causing me physical health problems then that’s not good and she’d support me quitting. Which is good, because, like I said, I don’t want to have to deal with her disapproval.

I feel like I’ve gone around in a circle and I’m still in the same position of “do I quit, or do I try anti-depressants?”. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I am hoping that if I started anti-depressants, they’d give me the strength and motivation to get a better job. At the moment, that just feels difficult. It takes me all of my work related energy to be at work. I don’t want to come home and then start stressing about applications and interviews.

But I also see a possible alternative route in that at some point soon I will have an opportunity to voice career progression related discontent to my boss. The project I’m on is almost finished and some time in the next month or so there really should be a discussion about what I’ll be allocated to next. This gives me a natural opportunity to point to my achievements over the past 18 months or so and express surprise and/or disappointment that I haven’t been recognised for them and officially given a more senior role. It might go nowhere, but that’s good in itself because it makes things clear. At the moment I feel I’m probably wasting my time at this company, and this discussion will remove the uncertainty. The timing is bad because the company’s finances don’t seem to be doing too well, but equally, I bring in a lot more money than I cost the company, so they’ll be doing even worse if I leave.

It’s worth pursuing that a bit just because it would piss Becky off if I got promoted.

Circles

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The GP yesterday got me thinking again.

The rough summary is that she felt very emphatically I should be on anti-depressants. I’ve had 3 GPs tell me this now. This one had my recent psychiatric test results in front of me and seemed concerned I had scored pretty highly for some things and that without treatment I might get worse.

She related this to my weight, as I mentioned yesterday, saying that, yes, I can go and see a dietitian, but the chances are that my diet is fine and it’s my anxiety issues preventing me from putting on weight, so we’re focusing on the wrong thing.

So we’re back to square one, really. I don’t want to be on anti-depressants, but my optimism since May that things will improve substantially has not been rewarded.

Phrasing it in the way she did, that “we’re looking at the wrong thing”, with the weight put a certain amount of gravity on it for me. Another way of framing this is that my job – because that’s where the anxiety is being triggered – is interfering with my physical health.

My job is a complex thing. I’ve spent a lot of time here writing about how much the social side of it upsets me, but that’s only a part of it. The whole package is… unrewarding at best. I think I’d be able to deal with work a lot better if I felt it gave me something beyond a number in my bank account.

Work

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So it turns out that my company has funded another five counselling sessions.

I decided on Friday afternoon that come Monday morning I’d just hand in my notice and be done with the ridiculous situation, but over the weekend I softened a bit and decided to just write an email to HR lady expressing my ‘surprise’ at support being withdrawn without discussion.

So we had a meeting. HR explained that The Boss had just decided to withdraw funding and that was that. Reasons stated were brexit, currency devaluation, and the fact we have a lot of costs in external currencies. I wasn’t very impressed with this, as you can imagine.

But HR lady and I had a long chat about mental health and how I was doing (answer: not great). She is actually quite good at this stuff; she has recently completed a qualification in mental health and has struggled with it herself – she told me she had been on anti-depressants for a few years because she was suicidal. She offered to go back to The Boss and ask again.

Which she did. And then five more sessions opened up.

So on the one hand, I’m grateful for that. On the other, it just seems ridiculous to me that The Boss caused resentment over such a trivial amount of money. The company lost far more than £150 between my time, HR lady’s time, and The Boss’s time just discussing the matter. The brexit argument was hard to sympathise with; I didn’t benefit when the currency was stronger, and there are plenty of other local companies who don’t have high costs in foreign currencies, so it’s unclear why I should accept that.

So I don’t know how I feel. I was close to quitting, and now I regard this as a temporary counter-offer. But it still damages trust, which is hard to rebuild. The last year at work seems to have been a sequence of people damaging my trust and then being surprised when that causes problems.

94d

I’m still struggling with job seeking. I am getting so much low-effort spam from recruiters that it’s overwhelming. I am getting emails from recruitment agencies saying “thank you for your application, please phone me on this number” when I haven’t submitted any applications, and “I tried to phone you but couldn’t get through” when they don’t even have my phone number. I’m not dealing with recruiters who are dishonest right from the start, but separating spammers from possible leads is energy and time consuming, which is demotivating.

I don’t get it. If there’s a strong market for my skills then make it easy for me. If there isn’t, then why are you spamming me?

I did get one from an in-house recruiter which looked a bit more promising but the location isn’t great.

Unsent letters

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To: HR Lady
CC: My boss (and yours)

Dear HR lady,

My counsellor has informed me that the company has decided against funding additional sessions, and that you would speak to me about this matter this week. I am disappointed that you have not done this, and have instead allowed a third party to deliver news to me which should have come directly from the company.

I was extremely surprised by the decision to discontinue funding counselling. In May, you wrote that my mental health and well-being was important to the company and that you would review whether I needed further support after the 5 sessions were consumed. The decision not to continue was made without consulting me, so I am therefore extremely disappointed that the company no longer considers my mental health and well-being important.

Furthermore, I have received no explanation or communication in general regarding your cancellation of the ‘late June’ follow-up meeting, which we had scheduled. I consider it a recurring problem that the company is not communicating with me to an acceptable standard on matters of professional importance.

About six months ago I would have sent this without too much deliberation.

Now…

I have a growing suspicion she might be a bit autistic. But I can’t take on responsibility for her mental health as well as my own, on the basis of a vague suspicion.

Knowing when to walk away

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HR lady was not at work today so nobody has yet spoken to me about things. My counsellor informed me she had stated she would speak to me “later this week”, which would now be surprising as she is extremely rarely in the office on Fridays. It’s not impossible, but it’s not likely.

I actually think it’s somewhat unlikely that she’ll successfully speak to me on the first day she is in the office anyway – I think she’ll try to arrange a meeting around the time I’m leaving (because that’s her style) and this time I’ll reject it and tell her to fit it into my working hours instead.

I have been thinking about things.

I am torn, but something that keeps coming up in my mind is that I quit my previous job after less than a year because I was frustrated by poor management which didn’t treat me very respectfully in a professional capacity.

At no point since have I ever thought “I wish I hadn’t quit that shitty job”, or “if only I’d stuck it out for another six months”.

I quit and my life improved. It felt risky and scary at the time, but with hindsight it’s obvious that there was no way my life could have improved without quitting, because it wasn’t under my control. Only the company had the power to fix it, and they weren’t interested.

And so once again, here we are.

Apparently though it’s emotionally easier to quit a job after 7 months than 7 years.