My life is in transition but what else is new!
I quit my full-time job after 8 LONG years. After having battled imposter syndrome, gaslighting, and constantly feeling undervalued while being overworked; I decided to reclaim my time (like Auntie Maxine told me to do, okurrrr).
This wasn’t an easy decision.
As a child growing up in a community of immigrants with poverty and many forms of generational trauma around me, the idea of not having a stable income for myself was triggering. Dreams of money, fame, and power fed me as I struggled with the idea of achieving my “American Dream”. Knowing deep down that “dream” wasn’t meant for people like me.
I wanted to be on top and have so much money, buy a house, send my kids to the best schools. My family would want for NOTHING!
This dream fueled me until I entered the workforce full-time. Then the hammer came crashing down on me. Being a young person who presents as a woman in a male-dominated industry introduced to me a type of sexism and ageism I never experienced before. I still get triggered thinking about the situations I have been in at work which I didn’t have the words to describe how they made me feel at the time.
It was a catch-22 where I would be applauded for putting my job first and working tirelessly but then my opinion was deemed invaluable because I presented as a woman. I went from company to company, hoping for change, and decided to try my luck in corporate America.
It was a reprieve.
I was no longer being confronted with sexism but eventually something else crept up that I had no tolerance for, microaggressions in the workplace. Even though I spent a lot of time towards the end of my corporate career educating others on racism in the workplace, the idea that people could just go back to work after these conversations took place didn’t sit right with me.
It made me OBSESS on why I couldn’t just jump back in to work and exacerbated my overall feeling of not being a valuable member of my team. At some point, I got tired of feeling like who I am was a detriment to the places I worked for. I had spent years being overlooked, treated unfairly and undervalued and then it suddenly all made sense to me.
Corporate culture and its passive-aggressive ideologies were not created for someone like me (a queer, female presenting, Afro-latinx person) to succeed. Even though I came to this realization it didn’t stop the shame and guilt I felt for not finding success in corporate culture. Not being career-oriented made me feel as if I was a lesser human and I let “the man” get the best of me. As if, thinking about the decision to leave and God forbid actually go through with it undid the work all my feminist role models did for me.
I was looking back on the years of hard work and dedication trying to solve the puzzle of how I got here? To this place of self-doubt, worry, shame, guilt, embarrassment and loneliness. The degrees, accolades, and years of experience left me stuck in the same position where no one would ever see my potential. I had heard of the glass ceiling women reach in their careers and my dream was to shatter it but damn, how could I ever achieve that dream when I couldn’t even get past the entrance to the building the ceiling was in.
I had really convinced myself that I was mediocre and aiming too high in life.
All the nights I spent crying thinking of the money (because school ain’t cheap), time, and resources wasted on a dream I would never be good enough for. It took a depressive episode where I couldn’t get out of my bed and months of feeling like there was no point in living to finally quit. At this point I realized, like most other times in my life, I couldn’t heal in the same place where I was hurt.
So, I left.
I decided at that moment to pour into myself because I can’t quit on me! I have gotten myself this far, and with a lot of self-love I could get me farther!
I am grateful for the privilege I have to take this time to really figure my shyt out; grateful to my partner who simply told me, “I got us” when I made the decision to leave; grateful for taking the chance on myself to have a different life than the one I planned to have.
My life is nothing like I imagined it would be, it’s better, and I intend to keep it that way!