First of all, I don’t really know if this is a rant, or me seeking advice or just me seeking affirmation.
I graduated with a degree in finance years ago only to find getting a job with few connections to be nearly impossible.
It wasn’t the worst thing in the world though, i was a restaurant server in a high income area making pretty good money and it paid the bills. However, I still wanted more, some sort of fulfillment. And, yeah, I wanted to live well and make a fucking boatload by doing something interesting.
I bought into the bootstraps bullshit, the “hard work will pay off” bullshit. I sat in coffee shops every day off and became productive for hours. Some days I would read new shit, others I would try to take Udemy classes to learn new skills, many days I would apply for jobs and cold email recruiters and hiring managers.
Well, eventually I was able to land an entry level gig in accounting making okay money but probably less than I was making as a server. And that was fine cause it was just a start and I would show what I could do.
Well that was when the corporate politics hit me like a freight train. My “teammates” were two early twenty-something girls who pretty much made my life a living hell from day one. I was treated like shit pretty much on a daily basis, I would be thrown under the bus constantly. They basically teamed up on me to promote themselves and make an example of me. Eventually my manager began to treat me like shit too because of them and it was just a misery. Not to mention they expected you to pull 60-80 hour weeks with no OT.
In November I reached a breaking point and contacted my old job where I was a server and they took me back and since then I’ve been so much happier. It has its own bullshit but what I was doing was so soul crushing that I haven’t looked back.
Unfortunately, my mother doesn’t feel as I do. She refuses to say it but she is definitely looking down her nose at me and feels ashamed that I’m a lowly server now and not doing something with my degree. I keep telling her I’ll look for something else, but the reality is, I’m so disillusioned by the whole idea of corporate bullshit that I don’t know if I even want it anymore, even though I wanted it so bad before. I rather be happy doing this, instead of being miserable but doing something that people think highly of.