Regrets.

Back in 2015, I was a completely different person living a completely different life. I had a rockstar career at GMR Marketing, where I basically got paid to travel the country and visit various music festivals. I loved the people in the office, I loved my tour staff, and I woke up just about every morning excited to go to work. I had also recently met the love of my life, Moises, and we were enjoying the honeymoon phase that all new relationships go through. My life felt almost perfect; the only challenge was the fact that Moises lived in Green Bay, and I lived in Milwaukee, and I hated missing him all the time. I wanted to build a life with him, which meant, for me, that we needed to live in the same place. And since Moises shares custody of his son with his ex-wife who also lived in Green Bay, that really left only one option: I would have to move.

I was torn over this for months. I didn’t want to give up a career that I loved, but I also wanted to, eventually, marry Moises and have a family of our own. He insisted that we could make it work long distance as long as we needed to; he didn’t want me to give up my career, either. But I wanted to have it all, and I was determined to find a way to make that happen.

Now, Green Bay isn’t exactly a metropolis, and the job opportunities in my field up here are few and far between, so for a long time, things looked, and felt, pretty hopeless. That is until one fateful day in the winter of 2015 when a seemingly perfect job opportunity at a large, prestigious company was dropped into my lap. I interviewed… and interviewed… and interviewed some more. The whole process took 4 months in all and then, finally, one day in June, I was offered the job I’d fought so hard to get – an Account Manager position. I was ecstatic. It was a huge step up in my career, a huge step up financially, and it would allow me to move to Green Bay and be with Moises. Sure, I’d have to commute to work, but it was a small price to pay for all of the pieces of my life finally falling into place.

And so, I quit my job at GMR, found someone to take over the lease at my apartment, found a cute 3-bedroom house to rent in Green Bay, started my new job, and moved, all within the span of two months. It was a hectic summer. Moving day was my birthday, and my whole family came to help. We went out to brunch the next day to celebrate before they headed back. I remember that Moises had flowers delivered to the table with a note welcoming me to Green Bay, and two hours away from the town I’d grown up in, for that moment, I felt like I was finally home.

Unfortunately, things went downhill faster than I ever could have imagined that they would.

I learned very quickly that my boss was one of the most manipulative, cruel, deceitful, vain, shallow and horrible people that I’d ever cross paths with.  There aren’t enough words in my vocabulary to accurately describe this woman – and she had it out for me almost from the very beginning. There was no support, no guidance, and no kindness from her. I also learned very quickly that everyone on my team despised her, and that she liked to pit us against each other by talking about people on the team to other people on the team. Within my first month of employment, I got pulled into a meeting with HR and my entire team, as well as my boss’s boss, to discuss her behavior, and how it would either change, or she would be gone.

Things didn’t change. And yet, she’s still there.

By the time January of 2016 rolled around, I was a mess. My anxiety and depression were through the roof. I was constantly terrified of losing my job because of the way my boss treated me. She constantly told me I wasn’t performing up to expectations, but wouldn’t give me any idea or guidance as to how to get to where I needed to be. I felt physically sick when I woke up every morning, and I found myself crying in the bathroom at least once a day. I began seeing a psychiatrist in hopes of getting my emotions more under control, but with no immediate way to change the underlying cause, there wasn’t much that all the medication in the world could do. Slowly, I lost my self-esteem, my confidence, and my happiness.

Eventually, my boss put me on a performance plan, and I knew at that point that I had to get out before she fired me and I found myself unemployed. Looking back, as hard as it is to admit, I had no business getting that job. They had hired me at the highest level of account management, and I didn’t even know it until the first time my boss told me I wasn’t performing at the level I needed to be. I’m an intelligent woman, but I just didn’t have the experience necessary to fill that role, and they never should have given it to me in the first place. That fact, coupled with the struggles with my boss, led to an impossible situation.

Faced once again with the fact that there just weren’t many, if any, jobs in my field in Green Bay, and with time running out, I decided that my best chance would be to find a job in Milwaukee, regroup, and figure out my next steps from there. And so, I ended up taking another Account Manager position with a smaller agency just outside of the city. I was so excited to be back in the agency world, and to be out of my current situation, even though it meant having to leave Moises. I was so hopeful that I’d be able to wake up excited to go to work once again. That’s how, in July of 2016, I ended up packing up my stuff and moving back to Milwaukee, not even a year after I’d left. My dad and stepmom were kind enough to lend me their basement for all my belongings, and my sister and her boyfriend were gracious enough to let me camp out in their spare room so I wouldn’t be tied down to a lease while I tried to figure out what I was going to do next, and whether or not this job would be a good fit.

Unfortunately, once again, it wasn’t.

Almost immediately, I had a sinking feeling that I’d made a mistake. I thought at first that maybe it was just my horrible experience at my previous job that was making me skittish, but the truth was that this job, right off the bat, wasn’t a good fit. Though it sounds dramatic, it’s true; after my tour on my first day, they put me up in an almost-deserted part of the building, and more or less forgot about me. My new stress became how to fill my days; though I constantly asked for work, they apparently didn’t have any to give, so I’m not sure why they hired me in the first place. I spent the majority of the first two months shadowing other people to learn as much as I could, and taking scraps of work that other, busier account managers didn’t have time for. And despite the fact that I’d been very clear in my interview that the majority of my agency and account management experience was event-based, and despite the fact that they told me that that was okay, and that they would teach me, I ended up in the same situation as the previous job.

One morning, like a bad case of déjà vu, I got pulled into my boss’s office, and was told I wasn’t performing at the level they’d hired me. I fought back this time, because the whole thing was so ridiculous, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was so tired. I didn’t like the job, or the company, anyway – all I was fighting for was a paycheck. Not even two weeks later, after barely 3 months with the company, they let me go, and despite the fact that I’d uprooted my life to avoid it, I ended up unemployed anyway. And though they openly admitted their fault in the whole mess that was my time with their company, it was too little, too late.

So there I was, Halloween of 2016, no job, living at my sister’s house, and no idea what the hell to do next. It was freeing, in a way, to not have to wake up sick to my stomach and go to a job that was killing me inside every single day. I loved being free of that. But I was terrified to take any kind of next step, because I didn’t want to end up in another situation like the two I’d been in previously. I missed Moises. I hated being away from him. And I needed to find a way to make a paycheck, fast.

I finally decided that I was going to find a job in Green Bay once and for all. And after just a month of being unemployed, I did, and I moved back in with Moises. I work at a decent company now, I enjoy the people that I work with, and my boss is incredibly kind, but for me, it is a job, not a career. I don’t wake up every morning feeling sick to my stomach, but I don’t look forward to going to work, either. I took a $30,000 pay cut just to take this job so I could be in Green Bay. And I wake up every day – truthfully, every single day -  still missing GMR, and wishing I could rewind the past two years and choose not to take that new job.

And so, after these tumultuous two years, I am left with three profound truths:

1) I deeply regret leaving my job at GMR.

2) I am ashamed of how much I have failed, and how far I have fallen from where I want to be.

3) I am scared that I'll never get back to a career that I love.

What's the purpose of this post, you might ask? Well, there's something cathartic about refusing to hide from those truths any longer. I don't want to carry the pain of the past two years with me anymore, so it's my plan to leave it all here - to face these truths, and to move on from them. Nowhere to go but up, and all that. Thanks for listening, friends. Here's to better tomorrows.