“A bit beyond perception’s reach / I sometimes believe I see / that life is two locked boxes / each containing the other’s key.” - Piet Hein

Yes, that describes my professional life at this time. No matter how hard I work each day, there is always more to do, and something done was done improperly, according to at least one person at any given time. M.s. told me, “just keep swimming, just keep swimming,” echoing Dory , our favorite fish from Finding Nemo.

Frustration can be debilitating. Lack of control chips away at my motivation. Stress has become a fixture on the wall in my office. School is going great. I’ve received a perfect score on every presentation and every paper in this class. The last comment on my last paper was, “where do we go from here?” This is what happens when you are a better writer than your instructors. I caught a few mistakes and grammatical twists after re-reading my “perfect paper.” Hmm. Some of it just has to do with preference, I guess. I’m sure they read more for content than style anyway.

It’s like two fucking extremes here. At school, I can do no wrong, and every assignment I complete is literally the “best” that these teachers have seen, and I’ve actually been told that by more than one of them. Then, there is work. Everything I do here is inept, incomplete, needs to be reworded, re-written, re-packaged, re-done. I can do nothing right, and every day I am lectured on the importance of whatever-fuckup-the-day-has-brought-to-us. The more I learn about management, the more I realize the company I work for is poorly managed. Tragically so. This, too, is a frustration. Anywhere where you have employees who have been around for over 10 years, you are bound to have people settled into their ways and resistant to change.

Here I come, new ideas, new concepts, varied experience, and I can’t apply it anywhere. I would settle for getting through a day with the feeling, the recognition, of having done something well. Something is amiss on one side of this extreme. If I am such a stellar student, how is it possible to be such a poor employee? Either I am being graded way too easy at school, or expectations at the office are painfully unrealistic.

I’d be happy with a middle ground for now. Until I figure out where I’m going and what the hell I’ll be doing, I’m stuck with what I’m doing NOW, and I need to make the best of it before I can move on to any other place in life.

Today, I will sit in my locked box and continue to attempt to carve a key from the wood around me with the tools I have at my disposal.

-Barbarella

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