Tried to post this on alt account and it was deleted, attempting to repost.
I’ve been working a job that I hate for a long time. Almost 10 years. I’m trying to leave my industry, but I’m stuck in a place where the only thing I’m trained for at this pay scale is this specific niche of work. The company I work for has small units of folks who are expected to take on diverse tasks- sometimes it feels like everything is “our job”. And often in my time here, we have been short staffed. Not a team of 20 down one. Think a team of 6 down 2. We have never had temps to cover these periods and I feel like they have really taken advantage of us. We are sort of fully staffed now, but we keep having more tasks dumped on us so it doesn’t feel any more manageable. I used to think I could master my job somehow- I’d take work home, work nights and weekends (unpaid) to keep on top of everything. Somewhere in one of these short-staffed all work no play situations, I snapped. I began to refuse extra assignments and stopped bringing work home. My productivity slowed way down. I maintain, but I’m not a martyr to my work anymore. The guilt of this, as someone raised by first generation immigrants who see hard work as indicating personal value, has been really tough to shake. One bright side of this has been that with more free time and energy, I started to think about what I find fulfilling, how I might be able to get out of this place. I started a program to move into a new profession. I still work a ton now, but all the extra stuff is for me.
Now we get to the issue. I’m at a point now in my studies where things are getting more intense. I need more time to get my stuff done. Soon I will need to do apprentice work and I know I can’t manage my job alongside that. And I’m fucking terrified. Scared of losing income, worried about the future. Procrastinating on deadlines I need to meet and avoiding moving onto the next steps for my program. I’ve been working toward this a long time, and now that it’s starting to get real, I feel like I can’t handle it. I’ve had opportunities to leave my job before, but things never seem to pan out. Either they ghost me after the interviews, or I chicken out because it would be a pay cut. I have a really hard block on quitting with nowhere to go or committing to a plan where my pay is cut down. I feel really stupid about this. It’s not like any of this was a surprise, and I’ve worked really hard to get here. I even feel nostalgic now thinking about my job. And I hate it here, I dread coming here and badly want to leave. So why does leaving feel so hard? I just needed to say some of this stuff out loud. Can anyone relate?