Sorry for such a long post, I just need to scream this into the void before I explode.
I have been working consistently since I was 14 years old. When I was 14 I worked FULL TIME during the summer. More than full time actually, I was working 8 hour days Monday through Saturday with only Sundays off. I worked in the corn fields as a pollinator for an agriculture company that has a monopoly on most crop seeds (I'm sure you can guess but I don't want to be sued.) and it was basically child labor. We got paid horrible for what we did. It was hard labor outside in the crippling Midwest heat and humidity. Often times they would work us past safe heat indexes and they would have teenagers collapse in the field. We wouldn't be allowed to go home early for extreme heat unless several people had passed out in the field. Most of the workers were teenagers like me.
From age 14 onward I would work full time at jobs during the summer and part time during the school year. I very rarely did school activities because I was encouraged by my family that working hard would give me a good life, and I should push myself to always be working.
When my mother left my abusive stepfather, I continued this trend, but helped my mom pay bills and rent as needed. I wasn't even legally an adult and I was having to help my mom pay for a two bedroom apartment. She had been a homemaker for most of her adult life, so she had a hard time finding a job that paid more than minimum wage.
When I went to college, I did 18 credit hours or more a semester, on top of working 2 or 3 part time jobs during the school year. During the summers I would work a job full time, often with a part time job on the side just to make end meet. My hope in taking so many credit hours would be to get college done faster so I could start making “real” money and I wouldn't have to be working every second of every day just to survive. I was studying for a bachelors degree in Biology with a minor in genetics. The classes were hard, but I was told a job in STEM would give me a good life. That was where the money was. Sciences/biology wasn't even something I wanted to do as a job/career, but I did it was the most palatable STEM career option to me, so maybe I could just survive on a single job instead of multiple and would have some money to enjoy my life.
Well, I got sick. My doctors think I caused my body so much stress that I became very sick and caused physical damage to my brain. You know that spinning sensation you get after you step off a spinning ride at an amusement park? I woke up one morning and that was all I felt. All day. I felt that way for over 9 months without reprieve. I was unable to get up to go to school or work because I couldn't walk straight. I was seeing doctors but no one knew what was wrong with me. I was out of work for so long that both my part time jobs fired me. My grades plummeted and I was forced to withdraw from college and move back in with my mother. I had several scholarships for my academic performance, so my loans weren't as bad as some, but there I was with over $20K in student loan debt with no degree to show for it, and very sick with doctors unable to figure out what was wrong with me. It took about 6 months for them to figure out what was going on and even longer to get on medications that helped me. By the end of that year I was institutionalized for an attempt to unalive myself because I had lost everything I had worked for my entire life. I got placed on medications and diagnosed with several disorders.
After I managed to be stabilized both mentally and physically, I returned to the workforce. Jobs paid poorly and treated their employees even worse. I consistently job hopped for better working conditions over the next several years, just trying to make it to a place where life wasn't so hard. Recruiters looked down on me for my gap year when I was sick, and some looked down on me for job hopping every 6 months to a year. But I didn't know what else to do, whenever a job got too hard, I looked for something that might be better. It was for a little while, but it always ended up with me overworked, underpaid, and exhausted.
This brings us to today. I'm working the best paying job of my life so far, it's good pay for my area, and I am comfortable financially. Not thriving, but I am not clawing for scraps to make ends meet every month either, which is a new sensation for me. I have good insurance through my job and I have a stable household situation. However, my job drives me to tears almost daily. I process years to decades of my own salary every single day. All this money that passes through my hands to a corporation that continues to get richer as it squeezes its employees dry. My managers are inept to a level I have never seen in management before. Not only are they clueless, but they make everything the problem of the average employee in the department. You don't know something? You didn't pay attention to training (we barely had any) or you didn't read your procedures (our procedures are missing huge gaps of information). When we press for an answer they tell us to just use our best judgement. When we use our best judgement we get no praise for making it through, but if we are wrong we are scolded for not asking clarifying questions to we could do it right. My entire department is checked out and exhausted, no longer asking questions since it only gets us in trouble. Everything is our fault. We have no training to be able to be confident in our jobs. When we ask for training they tell us there is no one to train us and we have to learn as we go. I have been stressed to the point of tears nearly daily in the past few weeks. I am dealing with insane amounts of money every single day but we have no support or training, and our management throws us under the bus at every turn.
I don't know what to do. I don't even know what I WANT anymore. I've never done what I wanted because what I want doesn't pay a living wage. I do not want to go back to fighting for scraps that barely pay my bills. I do not want to go back to college where the stress almost killed me. But I also do not want to be emotionally and verbally abused on a daily basis.
I feel lost and broken, and oh so tired. I have not had a break since I was 14 years old. Very little has come of my blood, sweat, and tears. All I feel I have earned is a (rented) roof over my head, a considerable amount of student loan debt I will never be able to repay, and lifelong physical and mental disorders.
I'm tired. I'm so very, very tired.