“Soul-destroying” - sometimes that’s exactly how Work feels for me

[AKAmyself]

Right, I know I sound ridiculously ott and melodramatic but I wonder whether others feel the same and most importantly how you cope.

I’m in my 40s, 2 pre-teens dcs. I’ve worked hard to hang on to my career and am by and large happy I did, as its always been important to me to have my independence, financially and socially. I have a good, professional job in a large multinational. I earn a good salary. Thanks to it, we are able to afford the lifestyle we’ve always wanted for our kids and for our family - not talking luxury but a comfortable home, lovely holidays, extracurricular activities without having to worry about money etc. I am really grateful for all of this.

However... my job is also very stressful, and I suffer a lot from anxiety (sleepless nights etc); I am profoundly unfulfilled, as I don’t particularly like the sector I’m in; The management style is brutal and (my eyes have slowly been opening to this, and now I cannot unsee it...) sexism and mysoginism are rife and slowly, consistently chipping away at my ambition and self confidence.

I have worked really hard on myself the last few years - seen a psychologist for burnout; learned mindfulness; invested a lot in leadership and coaching training. For a while all this made a difference and I found a good balance. But it keeps coming back, this soul-sapping feeling that I’m just a rat in a cage, that the effort it takes for my mind and my soul to keep it all together, that the amount of work I have to put into showing up every day at work with the right “can do” attitude to manage whatever amount of shit will be thrown at me; and then to show up at home with the right “being” attitude to be there for my children and dh... well it’s just too much. I feel utterly lost in all of this - like life is slipping one worry at a time.

I am aware, as I write this, that I will come across as entitled and privileged. I am, as I said, very grateful for all I have. I guess perhaps I need to grow up to the hard fact that life is hard, that being stressed at work is natural, etc etc. I just crave a little lightness, a little decompression time.

The thought of going back to work tomorrow after half term (where I checked my emails daily, and could not stop thinking about work at all) fills me with so much dread it’s like a lead weight in my stomach.

I wonder if others feel like this - or have felt like this, and managed to turn things around eventually?

It's not so much living in the moment starbright, which is hard, but more trying to capture that happiness you're hoping for in the future now, rather than waiting too long for it, the danger being that it never comes. If you know what your distant dream is, then it's possible to make it happen in some small way right now, even if it isn't the whole dream IYSWIM.

You've explained that beautifully, Inseoir, and I see what you mean and agree. I used to find refuge in books, and in our garden. And the very occasional weekend break with my H. Also his hobby brought / brings us a lot of immediate fun which was a lifesaver through the tough years.

My dh is much better than me at living in the moment, and I am learning to, but bloody hell is it hard.

Our children are beautiful and give us so much joy, we love each other. Truly I ask myself - why do I want more (or perhaps- why do i want less?). I think it’s the anxiety of turning back, 10 or 20 years from now, and asking myself “where was I during the best years of my life? What was I focusing on?” And I don’t want the answer to be “awake at 4 am worrying about a presentation 2 weeks away”.

Anyway I’m finding all your answers really helpful and I thank you all for sharing your views and experiences. It helps to feel that this is “normal”, it makes me feel less “wrong” for feeling like this. It helps to be called back to my responsibility towards myself and others and the fact I have choices. It helps to be gently told off for indulging the moaning.

Effing Sunday blues, though

Hi

I think you have reviewed some really good advice here.

I am in the corporate world and went back at the start of this year after my second ML. I will be honest my company/industry isn't like this. We check emails in the evening etc but it isn't stressful and I don't worry about my job.

Do you think the others in the company esp males are as stressed as you are? Do they just wing it? Have you tried just turning up and winging something?

I wierdly like the Sunday feeling as I feel I'm 'better' at work than I am dealing with my two small children :(

X

The advice here is really good. I just had something to add in.

Five years ago, I went through a career change because of many of the things you describe. I found a new career I really love and it comes naturally to me. So far so happy. Except I was seduced by promotion and progression again and now I find myself starting to feel unhappy again as I have been running a department for the last year. I wish I had stuck where I was happy.

I just can’t cope once the role becomes majority corporate bullshit. Networking, meeting after meeting, dealing with barely disguised misogyny. Yuck.

I do have creative pursuits now, as others have mentioned, that cushion this a little. But I have learned an enormous lesson about myself and wish I had stayed where I was balanced.

Rainboho I'd not really thought about it like that (being seduced into accepting promotion / more responsibility etc) but that's exactly where my jobs went wrong too. If I'd stayed doing what I was doing I would probably have been ok but usually within 6 months of the new more senior position I would have leave and need a few weeks downtime at home to get over the depression / anxiety state I'd got into. Then it would start all over again - get a new job, do it well, get promoted - not cope on a personal or emotional level, leave etc.

In those days temping was a great way to get a new job - most temp jobs I did turned permanent, then the cycle would begin again. Unfortunately these days for the OP temping probably isn't an option -it seems to have completely died out.

On the other hand our son (who experiences the same sort of mental and emotional conflict when he's been in salaried positions) is now earning a lot of money contracting in the short term so he can save and build the more balanced life he wants in the longer term.

It does help to have the longer view in mind, if you can still manage to enjoy some part of the day to tedium and stress without going mad. The friendly chats around the photocopier were sometimes all that kept me sane.

I feel the same about my job at 35, it gives me a lot of anxiety. It’s stressful and the bosses are awful. I earn a good salary, great benefits and feel trapped as it’s a work from home job up North which is rare as hen’s teeth in my industry. I turn into a completely different person on my days off and holidays. That’s the person I want to be all the time.

I've posted something similar, I too am fed up with my job and really want to do something different but unsure what. I'm also in my forties. I would love to find something I really enjoy doing for the next twenty years before retiring.

I have a boring, repetitive job with no responsibility but it is 10 mins journey on my bike. Boss is a bully and loads of office politics that does grind me down, but I completely switch off when I’m at home. I work full time and as DH works long hours and as we have 3 DC
(Teens), i spend my time being one or all of the following; taxi, chef, counsellor, nurse, teacher. Weekends are spent cooking and cleaning

I have very little fixed time for myself, something I am trying to change but it isn’t easy. Something always crops up.

I'm in a similar position, but I am not that successful because I have had several periods of 'dropping out" and then, like starbright I start again, get promoted, which a big part of me wants, because I know I have a brain and am capable, but I cant deal with the pressure and the interpersonal dynamics.

I don't have any answers I'm afraid. I'm currently so depressed and anxious I can hardly get out of bed and I hate my job. But I feel trapped and that I will be a failure if I drop out.

Also I need to earn a living.
I used to enjoy my free time when I had less responsibility, now all I do is worry and feel guilty.

This always reminds me of the books the fall and rise of Reginald Perrin - escaping the pointless grind of middle management (and mid life) and swapping it for risks, a low paid job and flat with no opportunities, then remembering the lovely life you have left.

I would say, try to hold onto what you have, but with some tweaks. So, what will challenge and inspire you in the next ten years? Aim for a change of company, a training or promotion opportunity...OR... determine that you will take the foot off the gas and instead set some goals in your personal life. Or, like me, start identifying the earliest date you could leave the well paid job (even though I probably won’t leave then, it helps me to think about when I could). In a few years time the pride of your status and achievements might come back, and you might feel like you’ve thrown it away.

On a seperate point, could you join a womens mentoring group and try to challenge the culture?

AKAmyself - I feel the same. I will be working there until retirement so another 20 years! I am a single mum with 3 kids so no choice , I feel tied there.
I just try and enjoy myself outside of work - I have no partner but a couple of evening hobbies. Although that means I’m always shattered, I’m not giving up my me time.
My salary allows me to do my hobbies, and pay for the kids to do what hobbies and activities they want to. I do struggle with thinking positively - but I try and look at the good side. But yes it’s difficult.

Interesting read... maybe I don’t want middle management after all

brownturkey I have set up a women network where I work to try and change the culture . Have stepped down a few months ago as I have lost faith in the culture ever changing, and it was setting up even more unpaid work for me. It also led to having a reputation as “miss diversity”, as if it was my job to fix the prOblem. I am quite bitter about it, if I’m honest.

A couple of interesting things have emerged on this thread. First - I completely recognise what you are describing - the pressure of middle management, the emotional inability of coping with responsibility, coupled with an innate desire to do well, because I know I have the skills and brains for it. I would feel like a failure if I quit, yet I desperately want things to stay the same, which is kind of impossible in the corporate sector...

Someone (sorry on my phone so can’t look up who!) mentioned whether I think the blokes feel the same or they’re just winging it. One hundred percent! I am sure none of my male colleagues spend a second worrying they can’t do it (and are more than happy for me to pick up the pieces when they can’t). I have supervised a few guys over the years and I’m always amazed at their demands (mostly monetary) and inflated sense of self. They want promotions and status and damned the responsibility that goes with it.

However, I can’t just think like a bloke, as this attitude is so alien to me :(

AKA sorry I missed your question on the previous page. I’m 36, feel older, but look younger thank god!

Your thread has inspired me and my partner to forge an exit plan today though. Operation get off the treadmill...

Crikey, op, I totally identify with you, especially the middle paragraph of your last post.

I've done over 6 years under an incredibly hard driving micro manager of a boss and feel burnt out. I'm often given the more "interesting" characters to line manage, but one in particular is just hateful. The act of concealing how I feel, remaining professional and sorting out the never ending dramas they create drains the very life out of me.

I'm starting to doubt my capability, worry about and overthink everything. I've got a decent amount of savings but I just don't know what to do next. I feel sick about going in tomorrow too.

Totally with you OP. I run my own business with two partners so slightly different to your situation in that we are not middle management because we are at the top of the pyramid. But I still recognise a lot of what you say. After all these years it’s repetitive and there’s an element of grind - even when you have autonomy as I do - that is soul sapping. We employ a reasonable number of people in a highly regulated industry and sometimes the problems just pile up and you wish you could just jack it all in. I often wake up and think “ugh - another day of slog”

But I am a single parent to two children - youngest is 8 - so chucking it in is not realistic. I need this income to sustain us for another fifteen years until they are independent and then there’s a pension to provide for.

I have come to the conclusion that some of this is the much derided mid life crisis ! As you suggest, we both have a lot to be grateful for but there’s a sense of ‘is this all there is?’ And aside from the fact that I need the money my fear is that if I changed my life I’d take my dissatisfaction with me and would have given up the comfortable life in the process. Plus my idea of a different life is basically more time staring at the ceiling and faffing on the internet which is hardly more self-nurturing than my life now.

I am seeing a coach who has helped put some of this in perspective (namely it’s normal at this stage to feel undernourished and under a huge amount of pressure because your whole life is about other people - bosses, employees, children, elderly parents). That’s certainly the case for me. She also said that despite the pressures it’s easier to add things in to your life that sustain you than to remove the difficult bits. And sometimes if you become less available for the difficult bits they do fall away from your life. This is true for me at work where I just stopped picking up some of the menial bits and actually no one cared. On the positive side I am looking for non exec roles to expand my horizons. But wary of your experience of that becoming another burden and another way of being pigeonholed.

An essay because I am exactly where you are !

thanks all, really. I feel strangely uplifted knowing that i'm not the only one feeling this way. less lonely and less under pressure to "fix" things, iyswim.

I forced myself to sit down for 10 minutes of meditation after cleaning up the kitchen. The image that came to me was of a house covered in snow... looks lovely but it is in reality incredibly heavy and puts a huge amount of pressure on the roof and structural soundness of the house itself.... but spring will come and it will melt away...

Lovely image, might try that one myself!

AKA I love your analogy. You sound really lovely and importantly you sound happy and confident within your family unit and equally important is that you have confidence in your family's place in the world.

The way society is these days it's easy to feel lost and rudderless out there in the hard-edged world. Feeling strong within your family helps you to gain clear sight of the best way forward. Yes, it may be years before you get there, before the spring comes and the snow melts, but it will, and you will know then that this difficult period has been worth it. x

I’m interested in the emails - what exactly would have happened if you hadn’t checked them?

Maybe you would have had a mess to sort out on your return, but you would have gained those days of being blissfully ignorant.

MaybeDoctor itt might be a sort of compulsive conscientiousness - I get that, which is where I used to go wrong.

I've learned to care less, and be less of a people-pleaser than I ever used to be (ie more like the male of the species who never ever try to please anyone but themselves!) and have found that in so doing management doesn't give me any shit. Esp the bully of a manager who thought he would try to intimidate me, and instead I challenged him with some facts and he didn't know how to respond so he got off my case. I used to shrink away, thinking I must be useless, now I put on the same act that the men out in, blag-it and play them at their own game. Honestly it really works. I'm not talking aggressive, it's just empowerment, "know your stuff" and build up to it, over time.

If they try to pile work on me I call them on it "OK so you've just sprung this whole new project on me, let's look at my priorities and you tell me what you need more". It requires guts, but honestly it helps to call management on every bit of cluelessness when they suddenly want stuff done and don't give jack shit if you have to stay up all night to do it. Never try to be a hero, it gets you nowhere. Instead, do a solid "good enough job" like everyone else does and never allow them to compare you to someone else who they use to try to make you feel useless. Inside, think that the other person is no better or worse, maybe they act up better. You're individual and come with your own set of special skills, so shine out in your way because you are different to everyone as they are to you.

I've got the scars to prove it, but I focus mostly on my outside life, never over-invest in work, just do what's needed to get the job done, and emails will always be there tomorrow. 90% of it is just noise anyway, and if you didn't answer them the most important actions bubble to the top, the others are often just FYI ones anyway!

Bloody hell. Am 40 and totally get this. Definitely food for thought here.

I'm just getting up for work now after being up twice in the night with my toddler and this thread is EXACTLY how I feel. OP I even thought you must work for my company when you talk about the sexism! So so tired of it all but the money is good and the kids will get even expensive with Uni fees in 15 years etc so I see no way out. I did read the magical art of not giving a fuck recently which I think is most blokes default setting so I'm trying not to care so much now. I am pretty sure mine is a mid life crisis too.