Over the last month I started making some meaningful progress but then regressed back to normal again.
There was a short period where I really ‘dared’ to be fully happy and harmless despite the constant uncertainty and insecurity of my job. My thought process was that as jobs are always going to be uncertain to one degree or another, the jumping in point had to be here and now to be genuinely happy and harmless. I was starting to really check out the possibility that I was just as capable of doing my job without the anxiety and the rumination over what to do and how to ensure my safety, and I at least proved to myself that I could do specific, well defined tasks while remaining carefree.
What started to pull me back to where I am now was the concern that without that anxiety I would not proactively think of novel solutions to poorly defined problems or come up with smart approaches to navigate dicy political situations. It felt like I was walking down a dangerous alleyway at night in the pitch black, without my anxiety to tell me what was around the corner about to jump out at me.
The equation started to be a question of ‘am I willing to lose my job for this’, and I shifted to an approach that was slightly resentful. I was rebelling against the unfairness of how I couldn’t feel safe in my job without constant rumination. With that I was back in the more normal way of looking at things, where I started bouncing back and forth between that resentment on one side and trying to come up with new ways to approach my work that would eliminate the uncertainty/insecurity on the other side.
What I’m going to try to do now is rememerorate how I was when I was carefree, and try to consider the possibility that doing what I can while being happy and harmless is all I really need to do for my job, and that perhaps all the things I think I need to watch out for are just phantoms. Or, if it turns out that I can’t reconcile this particular job with actualism, then I can find another one. I’m not too attached to the higher income I’m getting, if anything there are concerns of appearing a failure to friends and family if I lost this job. But all in all, my higher goal is to be perpetually happy and harmless. Since uncertainty is always going to be part of life that means I will eventually have to make the choice in some actual situation to be happy and harmless despite uncertainty. When that moment comes it will be a moment just like this one, so I might as well make that choice here and now.