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I’m a few days late giving you part 2 of this story. I would like to say I can be more consistent, but my life and schedule change daily. One day, I am enjoying church at 9 am, and the next, I’m asked to drive a trailer 2.5 hours away. Hope you can roll with it for now…

The pathless path

I started the story the other day about how a lot of my life was wrapped around prestige. This clawing craving energy to be at the top of the echelon.

For which I was doing my work on. For which I was climbing as best I could see (promoted within a year at Freddie Mac, on a strategic consulting team working on a $30 million transformation).

And then COVID hit.

And I basically broke down.

I broke down from the weight of the outside world. Everything was going on, and everything was changing. I mean, 2020 was a wild year. We were literally locked down in our homes. Masks on everywhere, no more going into work. It’s one of the wildest things we’ve been through as a collective and one of the biggest generational traumas. I think we’ll still be unpacking for a while.

I was already burned out at Freddie, too.

A boss who wasn’t nice or cared about my success by any means (said some nasty things to me). Work that was fading as it was. Office politics had taken over, and it wasn’t even clear where the future of the whole unit was going. We were this team that really should have been in a different department, but that department already had that team…so we were like an orphan team that really needed to find new homes.

And change management is sort of a job you work yourself out of. Hopefully, the change is successful, and that means you’re no longer needed. We were getting to the stage where we were no longer needed. But because we weren’t external consultants with a company worth of projects to explore, we had to find entirely new jobs.

And I tried.

I looked around the company for months prior to going into lockdown. Some new team to join with more runway, a new project to work on, or just a new job. I applied all over. I tried to get the company to start a Sustainability team, but they had no appetite for it. ESG was a political thing with a lot of fraud that, at the time, I didn’t understand. It only seemed like a good thing, and I pushed hard for a few months. They never did start that team.

So no one was hiring, and then when COVID hit, no one was REALLY hiring.

March 2020 was when we locked down. I remember it well because I had just bought a condo in my hometown. I was really proud, and Freddie helped (one of two firms in the country that does that). And within a week of my closing, we were home for what felt like an eternity.

Thankfully, I was able to get some roommates before people fled the DC area. And people fled! I mean, people went home to family in other states or to the country (good for them).

But it was in that tiny condo that I really lost it more and more.