I can’t be the only one looking back at two years ago this week. It almost looked vastly different for me than the way things turned out. My career hit a tipping point it almost didn’t recover from.
At the start of 2020 I was really hitting my professional stride, being given more responsibilities, but also taking on more and more of the unpaid labor of our team. I was “the glue” holding the (10 man, cross-cultural, cross-generational) team together and I was getting resentful of watching others rise through the ranks while being told I wasn’t “technical enough” for a promotion.
I called a series of meetings with my boss and my grand-boss to get some clarity on exactly what was keeping me from the title change (and both the respect and the raise that came with it). Tired of the extra work I was putting in and feeling like my best was never going to be good enough, it took all my willpower to make it through the meeting without rage quitting when they all agreed I was performing above my title, but they couldn’t give me the money to match.
That meeting took place on the last day I set foot in the office: March 13. In many ways, the timing is what saved me from myself. I left the meeting, cried in the bathroom for a few minutes, emptied my desk and walked out to cool off for a few days over the weekend.
Cut to Monday, everyone was working from home and I was able to step away from office politics to an extent. I was back to the remote setup I had begged for only a few months before (only now minus the childcare and sunshine of January). I choked down my objections and let the “we’ll see what we can do” “give us time” messages placate my anger for a while as I struggled to stay afloat.
When I say I nearly quit again in those first few weeks, I do not exaggerate. And for many, many mothers, that’s what they had to do: cut their hours or quit their jobs to make up for the fact that their children were home. I think in the end, my stubbornness is what carried me through. That and the flexibility that I’d earned from a manager who knew that getting some work out of a chronic high achiever is better than losing an employee over scheduling issues.
Am I lucky the timing worked out this way? I could have had an entirely different experience this past two years if I had chosen to exit the workforce. Maybe it would have made juggling everything easier to drop some responsibilities. I’m privileged enough to have had a choice, to have had options, not good options, but enough to make things bearable. When so many have had no say in the matter, being able to muddle through the last two difficult years has brought me to where I am today. Just starting to feel in control and excited about my future. Some days it feels like more than I deserve. So in that way, maybe I am.
