I Quit My Job

Several things have happened this year in a way that feels a bit like unraveling a messy spool of thread so that it can be raveled into a neater spool.

I’ve been employed for seven years with a small business doing something I’m very good at but don’t necessarily love - admin/accounting/HR. And just that description right there also points to an issue - I wasn’t just an administrator, I wasn’t just an AR clerk, I wasn’t just an HR department of one - I was ALL THREE ALL THE TIME. I was also the Christmas card designer, the website design creator/coordinator, the promotional event booth, giveaway, and info graphic designer, and in addition to all of that I decided to launch a collections effort one year which was then expected to continue year after year (and did, and collected MORE THAN MY SALARY).

I launched an employee review program (that I had launched and tweaked at a former job) so that we the employees and the boss could communicate any issues/concerns/questions/feedback in a regular, timely manner. This lasted 2 years. I had hoped I would have this open opportunity to express my concerns as they accumulated through the year but nope - they just stopped. And “approachable” is not the first or even 20th word I would use to describe my boss. The amount of complaining I heard directly from them every single time someone requested anywhere from an afternoon to a week off - I still hear it in my head “Ugh!”

About 2-3 years ago the boss said they were joining up with another agency - that was it - no explanation of what that meant for my job, for other employees’, for the company structure, for benefits, for anything. I had no idea what to expect - if I should stay and keep giving my labor when I could be looking for a new job - no idea if I needed a new job - no idea if my coworkers would need a new job. Zero communication of expectations or hopes/goals with the merge. That loomed over my head and was like a background static noise of stress. I did not feel valued or considered (which fine, fair, it’s not MY business, but I would have been a bit more considerate). 

Then last year I was asked to research a new PEO company - this was the THIRD time in my seven years there that my boss wasn’t happy with the PEO so we switched (and the new PEO never made them happy for long). I am not an HR expert, I have no certifications, I have no desire to be HR in any capacity other than something like talent development and retention. And yet I performed, I researched and created a comparative spreadsheet outlining cost and function and how it stacked up to the current PEO. I suggested what I thought (from my limited knowledge) was the best option and invited the boss into further interviews with that company (which they joined maybe once or twice out of like 4 calls). The boss said ok, go with that one, and it was then up to me to do the entire onboarding and training - not as a CFO or VP or anything with a significant pay increase - just as my base salary which had only been increased twice (because I had to ASK). During the onboarding I started to realize that although this new PEO said they did everything AND more than what existed before - they did not have key elements.

I panicked. Again, this boss was not exactly approachable. Somehow all this anxiety that was bubbling under the surface for YEARS just came boiling and erupting out. Even just typing about it years later makes my chest all tight and my eyes feel like they’re fighting back tears. I tried to handle the work situation on my own, when that did not work I brought my boss in - it was a disaster. It was a manageable disaster though - no loss of money, no loss of PEO service - just a complete loss of will on my part to continue contributing my people-pleasing sacrifices somewhere they were greedily grabbed at and demanded more of.

I started therapy thanks to that incident. I’ve had therapists multiple times in my life - it’s an incredibly helpful tool to discuss and work through different situations in life - hopefully shedding some light on the less productive ways I would handle things and giving better options or lenses to view things from. My therapist was super helpful - challenging my instantaneous and unquestioned instinct to fix things, solve things, do more things - all with my sanity as the sacrifice in exchange. I started to see where my normal job duties blurred into the WAY above and beyond self-sacrificing self-assigned extracurricular tasks that piled up. The really bonkers thing is that I don’t even think my boss ASKED for most of those extracurriculars, they were just something I volunteered for and then created the eternal expectation to continue - HOW SILLY IS THAT??

I had recently switched from weekly to monthly therapy sessions - just to keep my new non-people-pleasing skills honed and checked by an expert. I continued working, drawing invisible boundary lines on how personally I took work issues. At the end of February my mom fell - I was at the office and my husband was home - he got an ambulance to take her to the hospital and I met her there - leaving work early. She fractured her hip (all of this is a whole other post I’ll get to), she had surgery the next morning to fix it and that surgery went well and we expected her to be able to walk immediately and either recover at home or stay a couple days in a rehab facility. The day after her surgery she passed - which again, is a whole other post and obviously way more complicated with lots for me to unpack.

My mom passed on February 28th, I had a scheduled surgery coming up on March 31st (the day after she would have turned 77) that I knew I needed to save my time off for. I took 2 days off (not paid, I had to use my PTO). At the time I was grateful for the distraction - from my mom’s passing and from thinking about the upcoming surgery. Looking back now - holy crap I should have asked for FMLA (which would have gotten an UGH!) because I was not 100% or even 50% okay. I just launched into avoidant tendencies and didn’t stop to think. I will say my coworkers were incredibly kind and thoughtful through the death of my mom and my surgery.

My surgery (preventative double mastectomy direct to implant) happened as scheduled - however, a few hours after the surgery I had a hematoma complication which then required a second surgery that same day. That is ANOTHER WHOLE LOT OF TRAUMA that I will be writing about as well - but suffice it to say, my right breast felt like it was going to explode - I ended up needing two bags of blood and one bag of plasma to replace what I had lost from the hematoma. They fixed the hematoma and got an implant in. I spent two nights in the hospital. Recovery was one week off of work - but because I did payroll, I knew I had to log in for that at least. I also hated being alone with my thoughts and I was ok to sit and type for a few hours a day so I decided to return to working part time after one week. YES I rushed back in, YES it was my decision, YES it probably still had to do with people-pleasing, and YES looking back it was a bad idea. 

Then a crappy work situation occurred - I wasn’t part of it but of course I had to mad dash to handle it, going beyond my scope of experience and way beyond my stress-level tolerance (ya know, with a recent death and then surgery with complications). I wouldn’t say I “snapped” - but that day my mom’s Mary Engelbreit calendar said “Say it loud, say it proud, I’m an Artist!” so ya know, as any normal person would, I saw that encouraging calendar page and the shitty incident I had to poop-scoop up all day as a clear sign I should quit. I put in my notice, and in true “I’m not 100% cured of people-pleasing” fashion, I gave 2 months’ notice.

For two months I continued to octopus-handle (when you’re doing 8 things at once) my regular job duties, the job duties I signed myself up for, and of course, create helpful guides and info on my job position for whoever would be taking it over. It was understood that the accounting part of my position would be handled by the other agency they were merging with (this turned out not to be the plan - but I had no idea because nothing about the merge or the safety of my position was EVER communicated to me in the 2 years it was going on). I basically explained and outlined everything I had been in charge of for 7 years - and when I typed it all out I started to realize how much SHIT I had been handling all these years and how really, it looked like the work of 3 people/positions and I was doing it ALL for the pay of one person/position (and less than I knew others in the company got because I was HR!).

The real swift kick to the vagina came when my replacement was hired. A friend of the boss. I had hoped by giving 2 months’ notice it would be maybe a month of searching for and then a month of training my replacement. Nope, my replacement started AFTER my last day - even knowing it was the boss’s friend and the hiring was happening. I only got 2, maybe 3 days of training with them in. I tried not to care, but I still had that people-pleasing desire to leave a place better than when I got there - and this was just not the case. Then. . . the absolute face-slap cherry on top, I had to process my replacement’s new hire paperwork (ok, fine, not a problem) and their pay rate was SIXTY ONE PERCENT MORE THAN MINE!!!!! EXCUSE ME??? What the fuck have I been doing there for SEVEN YEARS, in a crap management environment, doing more than asked yet never being rewarded for it, collecting OVER $100,000 in past-due invoices (pretty sure it was more than $200K actually), and giving up 40 hours of every week of my life (plus whatever health toll from the stress).

Fuck that. I was furious. I didn’t let it affect my work ethic, I completed my tasks up to the last minute I worked there and tried to be as positive as possible while training my replacement. Ya know, in 90% of the jobs I’ve quit, I’ve gotten a lil goodbye party with a card signed by the team and a cake or something. This job, which I gave seven years to, worked with a small team of under 20 people, coordinated the best boss day or birthday gifts for the boss, and immeasurably improved the accounting and HR functions - I got lunch at a restaurant by the office. No card, no cake, no acknowledgement of everything I did - just “oh hey, I guess we’ll have lunch today”. To use my former boss’s favorite phrase “UGH!”

Fast forward and it’s been 6 months since I gave notice, 4 months since my last day. . . I have a deep internal peace about it now. That boss was not the type of person I’m meant to work for/with. Sure, it’s a bit of a panic thinking about earning money my own way or trying to re-enter the employee role, but my goodness am I so GLAD and GRATEFUL I’m no longer at that job. I don’t like to talk shit about people, that’s not what this post is about, I played a part in my suffering and now given the distance and perspective, I don’t think I would ever enter into a situation like that again. I don’t want to disparage anyone, I just want to process what happened and how I felt. I’m grateful for therapy and finding a therapist who helps with people-pleasing. It’s an ongoing concern I have to keep in check (“Am I offering to help because I WANT to or because I want to be liked?”) 

I get it, jobs are sometimes shit, bosses are sometimes shit, life is sometimes shit - but if we can recognize unhelpful patterns and either correct or step away from them, how much could that increase our daily joy in existence? I visited my mom in the hospital after her hip surgery and she was still a bit out of it. She said something to the effect of how she felt badly for ever judging aging people when she was younger - I figured she was just thinking about how she would have judged herself at that moment if she was younger. I didn’t know she would die the next day. After some time and thought, it feels like it was part of some life review. It got me thinking about my life review and how similarly, I would likely regret being unkind to people. Then that thought expanded to considering how I’d been unkind to myself. Yes, I’m technically unemployed (that’s basically what it would be if you’re self-employed but also under-employed) and the thought of being an employee again causes massive amounts of dread, but I’m giving myself a chance to carve my own path. I’ve never been a fan of capitalism but if I can cobble together enough money to pay the bills through my own business, my art, my earrings, my stickers, my writing, my content (while having the downtime and space to help others freely) - then I think that’s a life I would be THRILLED to review in the end. I don’t care about metrics, I care about peace of mind, productively helping others (NOT automatic people-pleasing), sharing smiles, and leaving some piece of the world better off than when I got here.