I’ve been applying to jobs for a couple weeks and I’m pretty sure the only interview I’ve had will result in an offer. However, I’m struggling immensely with if I should accept it and I feel like an idiot.
I’m currently a teacher on a medical leave for depression because my work-life balance goals were impossible. I didn’t want to be a teacher because I knew I would always be taking work home with me, but I graduated college in Spring 2020 and needed a job. I am desperate to get out of this job. The only positives are things I need to live like solid health insurance, high retirement contributions, and job security. To sum up the negatives, I felt trapped, hopeless, depressed, and had fleeting suicidal thoughts. Most of my colleagues taught 2ish subjects, often the same one just at a different pace. I taught 4, resulting in a ton of unpaid labor despite putting boundaries in place. When I didn’t work in my free time, my job performance was horrendous. I wished I could just put my head down and work, but I had to fight through student behavior/motivation/life problems constantly. It also never felt natural – I had so much anxiety from standing in front of the class.
The interview I had is for a Care Management Organization. My role would be like a Case Manager: meeting with families with struggling youth, developing a plan to resolve the issues, and then connecting them to resources to achieve the goal. Check-ins every 1-2 months. I’m very good at acting as a positive liaison and planning. I also wouldn’t be forcing them to do anything, so it feels less intense than if I was a DYFS agent. It also lets me do my favorite part of teaching which is working 1-on-1 with kids. I feel like I accomplish so little when I have 30 kids in the room with me.
I got a really good first impression from the agency. The pay was higher than I thought it would be, the benefits are great, and it’s very strictly a 40-hour work week with a lot of flexibility and WFH days. The company has realistic expectations and prioritizes the comfort and wellbeing of the workers, a stark contrast from being thrown to the wolves in education. Their mission sounds really powerful and would fulfill a sense of duty and service within me. Meetings with families could be tough, but it sounds like families typically find success and transition out of the program in less than a year. I also don’t see them super often and I’ll also have TIME to do administrative tasks unlike in education where that is expected to be done on your own time. The employee I spoke to has been there for 20 years and she said most people stick around for a long time there (she acknowledged that’s abnormal for their field). She also said there are kids being referred to them every day, so that says job security to me.
My biggest hang up: I genuinely feel so mentally ill when I say this, but bedbugs. I am terrified that by visiting low-income homes, I will inadvertently bring one home and then have a traumatic, skin-crawling experience paying an exorbitant amount of money to eradicate them from my HOME. I asked about the possibility during the interview, and they said they’ve only had 1-2 times ever that a home has had bedbugs. She explained all the ways that she once entered a home with bedbugs and was extremely careful and that you can send families a home questionnaire before ever meeting them to gauge if you’re comfortable going in.
I was the person during the pandemic who used hand sanitizer after touching anything that was outside of my home, wiped down groceries, and would stay as far away from people as possible. I needed to work remotely during the Delta surge due to anxiety when a COVID infection influenced a friend’s parent’s death. It would exhaust me if I were to take similar precautions to curb a bedbug, and even then, I don’t know how you can stop bugs from crawling on you. It sounded like we can meet with families in the office, but it seemed like this is not to be utilized often and that the family home is where over half of my meetings should take place. And even if I exclusively met with families at the office, what about all the other employees who are constantly going in and out of these environments? My mom told me that sometimes we need to do things we don’t want to do. I completely understand that, but it feels like such a huge risk as opposed to just some shitty desk job that you take to pay the bills. I also don’t want to trade a job that made me want to die for a different but equally panic-inducing job?!
Smaller hang ups: My girlfriend doesn’t like the idea of me going into strangers’ homes. They also asked me how I practice self-care during the interview. This tells me that the job is soul-sucking.
Thank you so much for any feedback. I’m really upset with myself. I could make my community a better place and improve lives, but this one mental block is holding me back. I have lost so much sleep over the past two days because I just don’t know what to do. I am terrified of putting myself at a higher risk of a bedbug infestation but I also really need to get out of my current situation and have a stable income and I would feel really dumb passing up a good job because of something that’s probably very unlikely to happen.