Why I didn’t quit my toxic jobs (part 2)
Last week I shared that one of my toxic jobs sent me to the ER with signs of a heart attack, but that I still stayed in those jobs. What I didn’t share was that it took me another 10 years, until I was so stressed that my job was literally killing me, that I finally realized I had outgrown corporate life.
The ironic part? I spent those 10 years making the same mistakes I made in the first 20 years of my career. Working late into the night to meet deadlines. Taking on the extra project to prove I deserved the promotion. Checking email on my day off and spending my time answering it.
One of the worst examples of trying to be the perfect employee: I moved a scheduled vacation to Mexico by several months to accommodate a critical project deadline. And then when the project didn’t go live, I worked on my vacation to try to push it through. Every day I spent the first 2 hours of my morning and the last 2 hours of my evening working. Instead of spending time with my friends and family, or relaxing on my scuba dives, I was instead leading meetings in the morning and catching up on email at night. I ended up working 20 hours on my week off. My reward for that overtime? When I put in for a week off 6 months later, I was accused of taking too much PTO.
Looking back, so many things were keeping me stuck in my toxic jobs.
I was worried that the next job would be worse than the current one.
Afraid that if I tried something new, I wouldn’t succeed and have to go back to a toxic job, but this time as a failure.
Not knowing what I would do if I wasn’t in IT.
I worried if I started a business, I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills.
But the biggest fear?
I was afraid I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t smart enough to do this (whatever this was). I wasn’t creative enough to succeed. I would end up homeless because I couldn’t pay my bills.
What finally broke the pattern
Obviously it was not the idea that “this stress might kill me” that I felt when I was in the ER 12 years ago with those heart attack symptoms. And not the idea that “this job is stealing my joy” that happened on that vacation in Mexico when I worked 20 hours.
What finally broke the pattern was the month I spent crying in the car every day when I had to go into the office. That same month when I snapped at my husband and nearly ruined our marriage. And every day I had the bone deep feeling that “I am going to die if I don’t change something.”
I’m one of the lucky ones. I lived to see the other side of my ER visit. My long hours of work didn’t kill me. I got the chance to change. Too many people working long hours end up having an actual heart attack, spending the last days of their life burned out instead of living their best life.
Today, vacations look different. I have coffee with my husband instead of sitting on a Zoom call. I am so relaxed on my scuba dives I laugh underwater. And my evenings are spent making memories instead of project notes.
❓What’s the vacation, birthday, or dinner you worked through?
Footnote: Working 55 hours or more per week increases your risk of developing coronary heart disease (heart attack risk) by 13% and your risk of stroke by 33% compared to a standard 35-to-40-hour workweek, according to a large 2015 analysis of more than 500,000 people published in The Lancet. [1, 2, 3]
