June 28th, 2010
Stress
Lately I have been stressed. In the past 5 years I have experienced many different kinds of stress. Law school stress, moving stress, relationship stress, unemployment stress. This is a pretty new one. Work stress.
One would not generally describe where I work to be a high stress environment. We are a non-profit and focus a lot on mentoring, teaching and outreach. I only have a few of my own cases and I go to court one day a week. Lately even this has been too much for me. I feel like everything I do is wrong (which is not something you are supposed to admit in my field) and when I go to court I feel like I am on the edge. On the edge of making the wrong decisions and being booted out as a fraud. Looking around me I am not convinced everybody else does not feel the same way but they are all faking confidence. Do not show fear or hide your fear with anger seems to be the lawyer way.
This does not work for me. I want to be good at what I am doing. I want to always make the right decision. I want people to listen to me when I do have confidence in a decision! And I never want to get to the point where I am angry.
Maybe I am in the wrong field.
I think this is all part of starting a new career. Maybe the unknown is what keeps it interesting. But there are many days when all I want to do is go back to lab where there are calculated results and very few surprises.
Um yes. I’ve been feeling this way for about 6 months. I hate hate hate feeling like I’m doing everything wrong and that I’m not learning fast enough. I’m also trying to figure out what the career change will be (but what do you move into when you aren’t sure what you want to do and you have loans to pay back? Yeah, that’s my problem). Anyway. I have no answers. Other than to commiserate with you and let you know I’m there too. I think I need to win the lottery (but apparently you have to play to actually win…).
I am sorry you are feeling that way Maggie but it does make me feel a little better that I am not the only one. For now I am taking the advice of my neighbor (she is also a psychologist so I feel like her advice is practically a prescription) who said that I should find a hobby so that I have something outside of work making me happy. So now I am on a search for a hobby??