Almost didn’t make the second day of my new attempt at writing. Today has been quite a long one, but I don’t think there’s too much to worry about, just the uprooting of my entire life.
Four days left in my current job, then the first big change. Then we hit two weeks of hard graft getting ourselves moved. Once that’s all done I can hopefully take a breath, maybe for the first time in five years.
Five years since I made a mistake thinking that I could rise above an environment.
You can always forgive making a mistake once. Twice is harder. “Fool me twice, shame on me”. In many ways I made the same mistake twice, putting myself somewhere uncomfortable and assuming I could carve out a space, a home, a place. Maybe this isn’t a second mistake, but rather these are twin mistakes, conceived and born together, now finally bearing fruit together.
We are not able to overwhelm our environments and shape them to our will, no matter how strong you think the will is. Many people have much less strength of will, but a million weak wills have a certain strength that no single person can overcome. This goes for smaller groups of people, the sorts of sizes that make up companies.
Thinking about the job I am leaving after 17% of my life, I’m glad to be going, but the place isn’t a terrible company or fundamentally flawed. It has an exceptionally strong culture built over decades and, regardless of the churn, the culture lives on in the people who work there. This culture is hostile to me, not in a malicious way, but in the way that wears my resolve and my sanity down.
The same goes for where I live, a good idea on paper but a bad idea in practice. Being an eternal outsider has been a good experience, I suppose, but I’m looking forward to not having to do it again. Different strokes for different folks.
Others thrive in these places where I wither. Will removing the toxic soil prompt new growth? Or has too much damage been done?
Who knows what will come next, I can’t wait to see.