There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

by Kikuko Tsumura

I’d found my previous job worthwhile, but had felt chronically betrayed in regards to both the nature and the quantity of the work involved, and it got to a point where I simply couldn’t stand it any more.

I’ll share with you a personal confession. Every month or so, I’m taken by the irresistible urge to chew my toenails. Now it just so happened that this urge visited me during my ghosting period, but I resisted it. I felt like my ghost wouldn’t want to see that sort of thing. There was an etiquette that has to be upheld by those being watched, as well as by those watching, after all.

Ewww

I felt a headache coming on. I made the decision, right then and there, not to renew my contract.

I’d read on the internet that it was okay to cite ‘personal reasons’ for a whole host of circumstances. Even when submitting a full-blown resignation, the article had informed, good old ‘personal reasons’ would see you through in the majority of cases. Whether you’d had a boss who’d made barbed comments about you at a half-hourly rate, or you’d been blamed for the disappearance of a document mentioned on the job sheet that had never existed in the first place, or your colleagues had spread horrible rumours about you, or you’d been held responsible for ruining a business deal that had fallen through after you’d refused to go drinking with some guy at the client company – whatever your particular situation might be, ‘personal reasons’ was your man.

The truth was that, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me, I’d panicked. The surveillance job hadn’t been that bad, but it had felt weighty and involved in a way that I didn’t feel capable of dealing with. Perhaps it just wasn’t a job suited to a chronic over-thinker like me.

After having to leave my old job because of burnout syndrome, I was rationally aware that it wasn’t a good idea to get too emotionally involved in what I was doing, but it was also difficult to prevent myself from taking satisfaction in it. Truthfully, I was happy when people took pleasure in my work, and it made me want to try harder.

‘So, what you’re saying is that you felt like the job itself was very worthwhile, but there was some interference that prevented you from properly engaging and building a healthy relationship with your work.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s the first time I’ve placed one of those ads, and I don’t know if what I wrote wasn’t up to par or what, but you were the only applicant we had! Are you happy to start right away?’

Sus

what I’d discovered by doing five jobs in such a short span of time was this: the same was true of everything. You never knew what was going to happen, whatever you did. You just had to give it your all, and hope for the best. Hope like anything it would turn out alright.