apologies if this is the wrong subreddit. to preface, i'm 25 years old. i have depression, anxiety, and ADHD, and i'm unmedicated for all of them. i am single, have no children, live with my parents and for the most part don't pay any bills.
i graduated college in december 2019. three months later the pandemic hit, and like everyone else i was struggling to find a job. by some miracle, a temp agency recruited me and i started my very first job in late april 2020, working as an administration officer in a courthouse. five weeks later, i would get fired. my co-worker found my twitter account that i specifically told him i didn't want him following and showed it to our boss, who didn't like some of my posts (tweeting about some of my co-workers being covid deniers, etc.). since i was only from a temp agency, i was just called not to come in the following week and that was that. i was 22.
my second job was at a call center. i started in late august 2020. our company was a contractor for the federal government, and our customers were unemployed and/or impoverished people on benefits. needless to say, there were a lot of rude and abusive customers, which were understandable since they were calling to inquire about their only source of income. my wages were just above minimum wage which didn't really motivate me to come to work, knowing i would only be abused by customers. on top of that, my direct supervisor loved to micromanage me and had a reputation of being the worst and most disliked supervisor out of the entire building. i was willing to tough it out for the rest of my contract (which was a year) because, other than the abuse, answering phone calls was relatively easy. but when i asked for one day of PTO and got “waitlisted”, that was the last straw. i resigned in february 2021 and lasted 5 and a half months. i was 23.
by that point i had gone through two jobs in the span of 10 months. it wasn't looking great for me. i decided to enroll in a one-year course that would make me qualified to be a library technician. i started school in july 2021. while i was studying, i was on unemployment benefits which meant i had to apply for jobs on the side. i didn't have any luck. i got a total of 5 job interviews for library roles in all of 2022 and didn't get a single one. i probably sent out a couple hundred applications.
in march 2022, i had to do a 2-week internship working at a library as a requirement for my course. it was mostly shelving and checking people's vaccine certificates and not much else. while i thought it was fine at first, on my last day of the internship, i was told by a staff member that i was being mistreated by management all along. that i wasn't supposed to do that much shelving in one day, that i was supposed to have been taught more about how the library was run, and that some of the feedback i got was unfair e.g. not being smiley or friendly enough, when all i was there to do was my job that i wasn't even being paid for and even though customers didn't complain about me. while they gave my school positive feedback about me, management was talking about me behind my back all along saying they would never hire me or let me volunteer because i wasn't “trying to impress them enough”. i was 24.
in november 2022, i applied to be a full-time “trainee” court clerk at a courthouse. i thought i might as well give going back to the legal industry a shot since they were hiring and i couldn't get a job at a library no matter how many applications i sent. the following december, they told me i was hired and that i was going to start in mid-january 2023.
so i started. i went through 4 weeks of induction where all we did was training via ms teams meetings and court observation. i lasted 10 weeks (6 weeks out of induction) before i finally called it.
two months in and i was already so burned out. the workload was insane, the expectations too high for someone who was still new, and my co-workers looked at me with contempt and treated me like i was a burden. the probation meeting i had on my last day was the final straw – my managers invalidated my experiences and basically told me i had to change my personality because my co-workers thought i was abrupt, unfriendly and defensive. i couldn't believe at first that half of their feedback was just about my personality and not my work. but i finally realize that when you are new and on probation, people expect you to, quite frankly, change your personality – be sickly sweet and people-pleasing and a bit of a kiss-ass. i don't remember being abrupt to any of my co-workers, but i thought that as long as i wasn't outright rude and that i was doing my job that i was fine. but i really underestimated how big of a part “likability” plays into being perceived that you're doing a good job by others. honestly i thought it was kind of unfair that they didn't even consider that the reason why i might have been abrupt was because i was already so stressed about being in court to smile or be friendly.
in the end they told me that they were willing to “keep giving me support” and that they would put me in easier courts but i had to call it. i really didn't see myself meeting their expectations or having a good enough work-life balance with this job or being respected by my co-workers (maybe race plays a part in it? who knows). it didn't help that i had to commute home 2 hours every afternoon since i don't drive and i would get home too exhausted to do much of anything.
right now i'm on my first day of indefinite well-being leave. my mom and i spoke to my union and they advised me that instead of outright resigning, i should “apply” for leave, go to doctors' appointments and/or therapy for the stress (and to prove that i needed the well-being leave), get paid worker's comp in the meantime, file a complaint, and then resign.
i was disappointed with myself upon realizing that maybe this job isn't for me and vice versa. i felt like i failed again. i'm lucky to be in a position where my parents are letting me live for free while i'm unemployed (although when i was still employed, we had an agreement where i would give my dad roughly 25% of my wages) but sometimes it makes me feel even more guilty.
i'm starting to think that i'm the problem. that going to work on time and doing the actual job isn't enough; that managers and colleagues expect you to participate in office culture and alter your personality especially when you are new. but it seems that i'm just unable to do this. when i'm in a new environment i am too focused on doing my actual job correctly to have time to chitchat and kiss ass. i guess i'm just stuck in the mentality where managers should treat me like everyone else even when i'm new and my personality shouldn't be under scrutiny so i just act like myself.
technically i can still go back to my courthouse job. i haven't resigned and they haven't fired me. but thinking about the sheer amount of workload, how far it is from my house, and how my co-workers either treat me like shit or i'm invisible, it just doesn't seem like it's worth it.