When I first joined this organisation (I won’t name it) 8 years ago in 2013, I was a bright-eyed, eager, undergraduate who was ready to take on the world. I had gone for multiple interviews and was offered a couple of positions but took this one because I felt welcomed and clicked the best with this set of interviewers. I felt like I belonged.
I joined the team as the “baby” of the division – because I was the youngest. I was also the “social media generation” representative so I really had some unique perspectives and ideas to offer the team. I felt needed. I gelled into the team and found forever-friends in my new colleagues. I enjoyed the work I did. I met loads of new people, be it within the organisation or outside in the industry. I rode the waves high for the next 3 years.
Then a shift came in 2016 – a huge organisational restructuring that I never saw coming. The wave I was riding crashed. Hard. Everything changed. I slowly lost my footing, my confidence and worst of it all… my voice. At first I tried to fight the current: I told myself I had to survive this, change is part of life. I had gone from someone who had a unique offering to someone who was looked at as young, inexperienced and naive. I began to only be given projects and responsibilities no one else wanted which made me care less about my work and it grew into a cycle until there was nothing left for me. Slowly, over the next couple of years, I felt the burning passion I had in my eyes back in 2013 flicker and then die away. I started to dread going to work. I started to hope no one would speak to me all day. I disconnected myself from everyone and the girl who used to bob up and down the rows of desks, being able to start conversations with anyone turned into an isolated, cold individual who almost never left her seat.
I desperately wanted to leave. I started applying for jobs, but when interviews came I found out I was pregnant so I had to stay. When I went on maternity leave, it was almost a given that I wouldn’t be coming back. Even if I returned to work after those 16 weeks, it wouldn’t be to that office. But after many conversations and going back-and-forth, I decided to go on unpaid leave rather then resign completely. That leave, which I extended twice, stretched 1.5 years.
I had the resignation email drafted out months ago. It was just sitting there in that maibox waiting for me to input the date and hit send. But I found myself putting it off everytime. I wanted to leave, I had one foot already out the door, but why was it so difficult?
I was secure where I was – being a SAHM. I had the support of my husband and had built a new normal. I had no reason to hold on to that job. But the reality of leaving it, being officially “unemployed” scared me to death for months on end.
Until one day Human Resources called me to ask what my plan was. In that second, I knew I had to make it official. “I won’t be returning, I will be resigning instead.”
There. I said it. And now that I have, there’s no going back. My safety net had been cut apart. I knew I didn’t want to return but having that net was comforting, assuring me that I ever did, there was a headcount waiting for me.
But there’s nothing now. If I fell, I would fall into the abyss because there’s no net to catch me.
Weirdly enough, I don’t feel the anxiety I expected myself to feel: “Omg I am really unemployed now. I don’t have a back-up plan anymore.” Instead, I feel relieved, like a weight was off my shoulders. If anything, it has freed me from the doubts I had about running my own brand & business. “I don’t have a back-up plan anymore. I better get serious about starting my own.” It’s true that fear is a motivation.
I sent that resignation email and then a few days after that I launched my eBook.
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash