It’s been a rough few months for me. Take that back, it’s been a rough few years. In fact, if I could just erase everything since April 2013, I’d be happy. Although, then I would never have lived in the beautiful home, have the car I’m driving, or have some of the friends I have now. So, there are some advantages.
But the disadvantages abound.
My mental health became a huge burden at some point since then. I began to feel broken. Like something was not functioning right. I just could not function like a normal human being, and it was my mental state that was on a direct collision course with my daily routine. Most notably, my career.
Sure, there were outlying factors that helped nudge it on: a coworker who I allowed to be mentally abusive to me for over a year, then allowed that company to side with that coworker to the point of driving me away, going to a company that nearly killed me both mentally and physically, then never fully recovering from that experience.
The thing is, we need to recognize when things are unhealthy for us before we allow them to destroy or damage us. Unfortunately, I did not recognize this soon enough, and now I sit here feeling the weight of the repercussions of sustaining the abuse of sucking it up and sticking with it.
The two jobs I mentioned have left me so full of anxiety toward my career that I’m barely able to function when I enter any office. It is a debilitating feeling, and something that people do not understand and tend to write off as being lazy or irresponsible. I had someone close to me try to one up me and tell me to suck it up, because they did when they went through it. Problem is, no one is the same, and not everyone has the same experiences.
The experiences I have had now made me hate what I do for a career. I absolutely hate it. So, my only restitution is to change careers; however, potential employers and headhunters only see what you have done and not what your potential can or may be. It’s a catch 22. I’ve rewritten my resume and cover letter so many times to try to persuade potential hiring managers to look at me, only to find my resume in the delete column on their computers.
I want to be productive and a participant in society. I do not feel like I’m done just yet. I just feel like I need a reset or reboot to get back on track. But how? I’m not even sure how to do that, or where to go to start. In fact, I’m not even sure what career I would be best suited right now. All I know is what I’m not qualified to do anymore.
But what I do understand is that in retrospect, I am not broken. Just beautifully cracked. My veneer cracked just a little, and can be fixed by filling the cracks with beauty, just as the Japanese due with their pottery. Because anyone can see beauty in the flawed and imperfect. And that is exactly what I am: flawed and imperfect, with beauty showing through.
Beautifully Cracked: My Life Bipolar 