All my senior colleagues quit and I am managing a five person department alone on a very junior salary. It’s been months and I am drowning and completely miserable. It’s affecting my mental and physical health. I have headaches all the time and I've cried more this year than I have in the past twenty. During this time I went from a stable weekend drunk to an angry recovering alcoholic because I started blitzing myself into oblivion every night to try to cope with the oppressive stress.
The cherry on top is that I’m performing senior level work on my junior salary, but even if I was paid accordingly I’d still be miserable. It’s just a slap in the face. I've been promised a promotion and a raise and I believe them, but there is no time table on when this will occur. Meanwhile interviewees balk at the low pay and I don't know when I will have someone to help share the workload… There is no one in the pipeline and even so the hiring process takes months, and after hire it takes many weeks before they’re useful.
On the positive side: great company, great benefits, personal growth, opportunities for advancement… I just don’t know how much more I can take and the situation feels hopeless. My friends and family think I would be crazy to leave, and that it is a “Me” problem because I need to handle stress better.
Financially I can afford to be unemployed for a bit, but I’d have to completely change my lifestyle to afford the loss of salary. I don’t want to be jobless for long, just enough to reset. I’m not sure I could handle the job search process in my current mindset because my new baseline is completely frazzled. I don’t know if I’m being unreasonable or if I’m needlessly staying in a toxic situation. Should I power through this difficult period or quit for my sanity? Are there any other options that I haven’t thought of?
Submitted March 18, 2022 at 09:52PM by DryEnthusiasm3032 https://ift.tt/lzm627k
