Right on Time
If 2020 was the year when routine crumbled, 2021 was the year when productivity went into overdrive. And 2022? Here’s hoping it will be the year where I finally learn to take my time.
During the early days of the pandemic, I found myself at the lowest point of my young career. My work environment was akin to an unsupervised playground, where school bullies turned a blind eye to the rules and any form of strategy was nipped in the bud. It was not a place designed for people who wanted to grow, professionally or personally. As the months rolled by, and my naivety diminished, I eventually realised that I was being strung along — the why to which, I have yet to understand — and that things would not, in fact, get better, as I was being promised, almost daily, towards the end.
While rogue workplaces are not uncommon, as I later learned from people who shared similar experiences to my own, they are immensely isolating. They intentionally make you feel like you’re the only one who realises something is not quite right, and may even go as far as to forbid you from taking breaks with your colleagues to avoid you from getting too friendly. The fulfilment that I sought through my work was severely lacking, leaving me feeling unmotivated. I picked up several coping mechanisms to help me through — I voluntarily took on more responsibilities to try make a positive change, I covertly confided in the one colleague who seemed to understand how I felt about the situation, and I even contributed ideas to help align my department with others — but the feeling of failure was pervasive, seeping into other aspects of my life, making me wonder how I ended up there at all.
I did not enter this job thinking it would “just be a Covid job”, as I later on told myself to feel a little more hopeful that things might change. I was looking for a place to grow. Instead, I found a place that forced me to learn how to adapt, swiftly. And that I did.
I began working for friends and friends of friends as a little side gig, helping them find their online voice, liven up their website blogs and make their business’ social media pages more useful to their brand. Within six months, I had built up enough of a clientele through word-of-mouth that I started to really think about doing this full-time. As the joy created by my freelance work grew, the situation at work became even more dire. Giving your all to a company that blatantly disrespects you takes a lot out of a person. And when that person finds out that a more recent addition to the team is getting paid way more than them — for the same role — then you know it’s time to leave. And so I left.
This blog post is less about shaming a company for their lack of ethics, and more about realising, in hindsight, that difficult situations can lead you to better destinations. I spent over a year feeling like I wasn’t where I needed to be, comparing my path to others who came before me, and wondering how much longer it would take me to get to that point where I can be happy with my work.
Timings may have felt off, but I now know that if you learn to trust the process, you should always end up where you need to be. This was a big lesson that I picked up in 2021. And going in to 2022, I’m focusing on trusting myself more than the unsolicited advice I get from people who don’t really know me.
I suppose this is a sort of new year’s resolution for 2022: Trust that things are happening right on time.
Life is not linear, and there will be many backtracks and leaps to take. But in the face of external pressure to conform to an ‘acceptable’ way of doing things — stand your ground. Admittedly, I don’t have all the answers, but I also don’t owe all the answers to anybody who’s curious about my life. The only person that we need to be accountable for is ourselves, but that is a skill that is harnessed through self-respect.
I recently came across a timeless article by the inimitable Joan Didion, which she wrote for Vogue in 1961. In it, she describes self-respect as a sort of mirror that enables us to see ourselves fully, both the positive and the negative aspects, all at once. She wrote:
“The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation — which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.” (You can read the full essay here, and I highly recommend that you do.)
This made me think. How much of what we do is preceded by a quick mental run-through of what other people might think about our actions? How often do we not do what we want to do, simply because other people are not doing it too? What if everyone leaned in to their true interests and desires and worried less about the audience on the viewing end? Sometimes, we can be too hard on ourselves when we don’t deserve such harsh treatment. At other points, we may need a little more self-discipline to grow as individuals.
And because it is an impossible task to do Joan Didion’s wisdom justice, I’ll close with her own words: “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses.”
