I have thankfully been on a mental health sabbatical / staycation and it was the right thing. I know it's not always an option to have a few days off in between jobs but I am sofa king glad it was possible this time around.
I was thinking about how we get a type of Stockholm Syndrome about work. Even if the office sucks and you dread going there and being there, you can feel iffy and weird about leaving. If you get to a party or social gathering and it sucks, you have no qualms about staying a short time, creating a blow off excuse, and then bailing the fuck out. Yet we will stay at jobs that drain the life from us. The saddest commentary of all is how many offices are dysfunctional as hell and how many jobs suck ass nowadays. It's not like there's some awesome job buffet where you can select a lot of good choices at any given time. Some days it seems like the choices are Shitshow 1, Assclowns 2, or Egomaniacal Freaks 3. The Horrible Bosses movies are actually pretty accurate, LOL.
That said, I am hopeful I have found a normal place to work. Or at least as normal as you can find in this century. I once read that one way to gauge happiness at work is whether or not you think about the office in your downtime. The more you dwell on it, especially if you get home and all of your personal time is spent dreading the return, the less happy you are. Sounds trite, but it's true. I don't mind being busy or needing to work OT if there is a VALID REASON for it. I love it when you look up and it's time to go to lunch. You look up again and it's time to go home. Then you don't think about work again until the next morning. That's ideal.
Something else that motivated me to leave was feeling like that place was turning me into something I hated. I was worried about the possibility of my depression returning, which I truly do not want. But I also felt like I was a bitter, angry downer. There were people I actively disliked, people I didn't know and didn't want to know, and a handful of people I liked. Candidly, the lists of people I disliked and the people I didn't know were longer than the list of people I liked. One guy, for example, seemed like an OK dude but he gave me the creeps. His hair was always dirty and greasy with large flakes of dandruff. He talked like Matthew Mc-con-a-hey's character in Dazed and Confused and he took a lot of pride in his wacky sock collection. Another lady who seemed OK was a relentless ass-kisser and possible member of a religious cult. We had to sit through a seminar (not kidding) on proper dress code because this woman's clothes were deemed too frumpy. Instead of complaining that her Mr. Rogers cardigans and croc shoes were too dumpy, someone should have told her that the light colored khaki pants she wears are damn near see-through and we could always see her ass. I never got the sense that she was an irredeemable asshole; she just wasn't someone I could forge a friendship with.
So ... Yeah. Mental health break was the right thing. Very grateful.
